


Solis Febris

by SerenLyall



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: #sick fic, (but don't worry i have a trick or two up my sleeve), F/M, Gen, also fair warning: the rating may go up in future chapters, also there may or may not be at least one nsfw scene, also yes this is a, and like i know where i'm going with it but i don't know how detailed or explicit it'll be, here we are, i never thought i'd be writing one and yet, just as a head's up this is a canon-compliant fic, meaning that the j/c relationship in this won't exceed the parameters/story set by the show, some dark themes and heavy subject matter will be brought up, we'll...see
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-26
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2018-09-19 20:36:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 44,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9459500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerenLyall/pseuds/SerenLyall
Summary: Catastrophe strikes, leaving Voyager and her crew all but adrift at the heart of a ravaged solar system. The trouble runs deeper, though, than depleted shields and a damaged hull; something is wrong with her captain - and Chakotay, desperate to save her, will face trials and tests of love and loyalty he has not yet dreamed of.





	1. Part I: Procella

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lodessa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/gifts).



> About a month and a half ago, lodessa made a post on tumblr about Chakotay putting a feverish Kathryn to bed (and then her getting handsy, lol). Me, being me - aka the desperate pleaser who is simultaneously always up for writing hurt/comfort - was like "Hey, I can probably write a fic for that."
> 
> It initially started out just as a oneshot, but as I wrote, the story grew. As of right now it's a couple dozen words short of 5k, and is probably less than halfway done - which I decided was going to be a bit too long for a oneshot. Thus, I decided to break it up into chapters. That's also why the chapters are so short, however; I used the natural breaks, which I had already incorporated, as chapter breaks. Because of their shorter length, I intend to upload a new chapter ever other day.
> 
> This story takes place shortly after the episode Macrocosm (3.12)
> 
> Lastly, I hope you enjoy!

Part I: Procella 

Chakotay jerked awake to the throat-clawing wail of the red alert.

He stumbled out of bed and groggily fumbled for his pants, fighting through the cobwebs of exhaustion which clung to his mind and body, making thinking and standing straight alike a test of will. He had stayed up late reading through personnel reviews and formulating a report for Captain Janeway, and had only gotten to bed in time for the gamma shift change; now, as he struggled to slide his feet into his boots and fasten the back of his jacket with sleep-numbed fingers, he thought that perhaps he should have waited to finish the report.

The corridor outside his quarters was dark, in turns swathed in shadow and painted a macabre red by the flashing alarm lights. The wail of the alert made listening for the sharp, concussive sounds of weapons’ fire difficult, but as Chakotay hurried towards the nearest turbolift, he could not help but think that the way the deck shivered beneath his feet—small and weak tremors, like chills from a fever—was nowhere close to the violent bucking of _Voyager_ ’s hull when she was under attack. Crewmembers hurried close the walls, eyes and faces pale in the dancing light, and their nods and salutes as Chakotay passed were sharp and terse with anxiety.

“Deck One,” Chakotay ordered after pushing his way through the half-open turbolift doors, which had shuddered to a groaning halt only just wide enough for him to squeeze past. For two long seconds Chakotay thought that the computer must have gone offline, and he faced the thought of crawling through the jeffries tubes with a sense of pained dismay—but then, with another groan and a shiver of the turbolift floor, the doors slid shut.

When Chakotay stepped out onto the bridge thirty seconds later, it was to a scene of bleached white chaos.

The viewscreen was awash with white-orange fire, long tongues of blue-hued flame swallowing the sight of the green-and-blue planet over which they had been orbiting. Yellow sparks like lightning flashed, adding yellow to blue and white and orange as the shields buckled, held, then buckled again. Shadows seemed to follow the handful of gamma shift crew that stumbled across the deck, their outlines hazed by the blinding blanket of light pouring in. The viewscreen was tinted dark with the radiation failsafes; at that moment, Chakotay thought, as his skin began to burn from the light, it was all that stood between the crew and a quick yet agonizing death.

“Shields at twelve percent.” The announcement was enough to send a thrill of cold through Chakotay’s chest, even as the white, white light began to burn his skin.

He was nearly to his chair by the time he was able to see more through the brightness than black spots and indistinct shapes, shielded though his eyes were by one upheld arm. His feet carried him down the steps and across the deck without his eyes’ understanding. His ears rang with the shouts of the crew as they struggled to stand at their stations, to keep _Voyager_ afloat in the raging sea of white fire, and with the shearing groan of the ship’s hull as the shields flickered, held, flickered again beneath the waves of flame. His head began to ache, a sharp, tense thorn of pain lodged at the back of his skull between his ears, making listening and looking and thinking all the harder.

Chakotay glanced to his right. Even through the film of tears seeping onto his lashes, the emptiness of the chair was painfully clear.

 _Damn_ , Chakotay thought—a thought that was quickly chased by a worm of fear. It was rare that Kathryn Janeway did not beat him to the bridge during a red alert, if she did not arrive alongside him.

He pushed the fear away; now was not the time.

“Shields at five percent.”

Chakotay turned towards the helm. An ensign sat at the con, her shadow quivering as hands burning from the white light flew over the controls. _Damn,_ Chakotay thought again, and slapped the combadge on his chest.

“Commander Chakotay to Lieutenant Paris,” he snapped, ignoring the prickling pain of burning flesh rasping against rough cloth, against smooth, heating metal.

 _"Paris here, Commander,”_ came an almost instantaneous reply.

“Where are you?”

_"Stuck in a turbolift, sir.”_

 For the third time, Chakotay cursed silently. “Understood,” he said, then turned to OPS. “See if you can’t get those turbolifts running,” he ordered.

 The red-faced ensign, whose features were too bleached and blurred for Chakotay to be certain who it was, nodded. “Yes, sir,” they—he, Chakotay thought, the voice was masculine, meaning it was probably Ensign Cardelle—said.

 _Voyager_ ’s deck groaned, the complaint growing from a low rumble to a crescendoing squeal. The floor lurched, and the shields’ yellow lightning flared in a glorious riot of dying sparks—then vanished.

 _Where is she?_ Chakotay thought, falling into his chair and gripping the armrests to keep himself from tumbling face-first to the deck as the ship rolled. _A few more seconds and I’ll have to—_

As if she had heard his silent plea, the door to the captain’s ready room opened, and Kathryn Janeway walked out onto the bridge.

"Report,” she snapped. Her voice was strained, her uniform creased, her hair tangled and soaked with sweat.

She was as beautiful as ever, Chakotay thought—and then almost laughed at the absurdity of the thought, in the light of _Voyager_ ’s dying shrieks.

“It’s a solar storm, ma’am,” Ensign Cardelle said. He sounded panicked, and in pain.

“Ensign Marcile,” Captain Janeway said, sitting down in her chair and turning toward the girl at the helm, “can you get us out of here?”

“I’m trying, ma’am,” Ensign Marcile said. Her blistering hands flew over the con, her actions punctuated by thin, choked gasps of pain. “The gravity of the planet and the sun are making it nearly impossible to navigate…”

“Tuvok,” Captain Janeway said, turning in her chair towards Tactical, “what can you give me?”

Chakotay looked over at Tactical, and saw the unflappable Vulcan standing at his customary station. The first signs of blisters were rising on his high cheekbones and nose, coloring the dark tenor of his skin an ugly, boiling red. Vaguely, Chakotay wondered how he had not realized that Tuvok was already on the bridge.

“The heat and the radiation have fused all but one of our torpedo shafts shut,” Tuvok replied. “The last one will be sealed in a matter of minutes—and the probability of getting more than one missile out before it is sealed is highly unlikely. Nothing else is operational, either due to the radiation or the heat.”

Janeway nodded curtly. “Ensign Marci—”

She was cut off by the squeal of the turbolift doors being forced open. Chakotay turned, feeling his captain do the same, and saw Lieutenant Paris and Ensign Kim crawl out from between the warped halves of the turbolift door.

They stumbled, the sudden, blinding light and the roll and shudder of the deck—which Chakotay realized he had begun to grow accustomed to, the shriek and wail of _Voyager_ ’s throes fading into the background of the pounding in his skull—enough to make them falter. Before he or the captain could say anything—could even react—both were back on their feet, and staggering toward their posts. Ensign Cardelle backed away instantly, yielding his place to Ensign Kim, before all but collapsing against the wall behind the console, disappearing from sight.

In the two seconds it took for Ensign Marcile to rise from the con and for Tom to take her seat, _Voyager_ titled and slid into a spin. Chakotay could feel the grind of her hull against the gravity trying to tear her apart, against the ravages of flame licking at her belly, and he imagined, for half a second, that she screamed with a voice as real as Kathryn’s, as B’Elanna’s, as Tom’s, as _his_. Ensign Marcile pitched to the side, falling to the floor with the sound of a subtle _crack_ , and out of the corner of his eye, Chakotay saw his captain grimace in pain as she was thrown against the armrest of her chair.

Then Tom righted the ship, turning her into the spin and sliding her out from between the shearing waves of gravity, bringing her nose up to ride the billow of heat and fire that lashed out before them.

“Hull integrity at forty-seven percent,” Harry announced. “All decks reporting damaged systems.”

Captain Janeway turned toward the viewscreen. Her eyes were slits, her knuckles reddening with blisters as she gripped the edges of her armrests. “Tom,” she said after one, two, three seconds. “How close are we to the edge of this storm?”

“Not sure, ma’am. But if I can get us out of the planet’s orbit, I should be able to get us free.”

“Tuvok, how long until the last torpedo shaft is inoperable.”

“Less than thirty seconds.”

“Hull integrity at thirty-two percent.”

“Time a torpedo to detonate in the planet’s thermosphere,” Captain Janeway ordered. “Tom?”

“Yes ma’am,” Tom said, “I read you loud and clear.”

“Torpedo armed.”

“On my mark.”

 _Voyager_ trembled, and turned with lurching grace under Tom’s deft guidance.

“Hull integrity at twenty percent.”

“Mark.”

 _Voyager_ jumped, the concussive force of the torpedo’s explosion less than four hundred kilometers away wracking her already failing bones. The entire ship moaned, long and low, and her pain echoed into Chakotay’s bones. She shuddered, shivered, and as she rose higher, higher, higher, twisting and rolling under Tom’s flying hands, buffeted by heat and wind, her bones cracked and buckled as she fought to protect the lives she bore. Fire lashed, light scorched, and Chakotay held onto the edge of his chair with the grip of a dying man.

And then, with the suddenness of waking from a nightmare, they were free.

The blackness of empty space yawned wide and cold before them, embracing _Voyager_ with empty arms. Pinpricks of stars danced across the viewscreen as she drifted free and suddenly silent from the ravaging hands of the storm.

“Hull integrity at eighteen percent and holding.”

A long breath slid from between Chakotay’s lips. They were still alive.


	2. Part II: Dissimulare

****Part II: Dissimulare

B’Elanna was furious. “What the hell happened? Why the _hell_ didn’t anyone catch any warning signs?”

She didn’t accuse him, but Harry shifted uncomfortably in his chair at the conference table when B’Elanna’s gaze landed on him, and he refused to meet her eyes. Seeing warnings that a sun was about to have a solar storm large and strong enough to scorch three of its system’s planets was his job—and his apparent lapse or oversight had nearly cost the entire crew their lives. He had been silent since _Voyager_ had escaped the storm, save to give voice to reports as they came in, and had not said a word since the senior staff members had gathered in the conference room.

Chakotay, seated beside her as always, wondered how Kathryn was going to deal with him—and with the anger and blame that was obviously already being heaped at his feet, by both his crewmates and himself. He did not have long to wonder.

Kathryn leveled a stern look at first B’Elanna, then at the rest of the senior staff seated around the table. “Every single one of you has made at least one near-catastrophic mistake in your career,” she said coolly. “Even me. Laying blame at this point will help no one—including you. Any lesson that may have needed to be learned has already been learned. Am I understood?” A smattering of nods rippled around the table. “Good. And make certain that each of your crews knows that too.

“Now, B’Elanna, how long until we have warp drive back online?”

“We’re going to need to do a lot of repairs before we can even think about going to warp,” B’Elanna said. Her tone was terse, and her lips were still thin with anger, but she seemed less inclined to lash out, or at least to start yelling. “Half of the decks are barely containing atmosphere right now, and our shields are shot to hell and back. We’re going to need to fix those, and beef up at least some of the hull before we can go any faster than impulse.”

“Time estimate?”

B’Elanna pulled an unhappy frown. “Three days, maybe. If we all work double shifts.”

Kathryn nodded. “Then you have three days. I don’t like sitting around, waiting for the Kaminoans to find us sitting here like a bird with clipped wings.”

The Kaminoans were a highly advanced, insectoid race of people that _Voyager_ had encountered two weeks earlier. Their planet, covered almost entirely with salt-water oceans whose beds were comprised of many minerals _Voyager_ needed desperately, seemed like a miracle. After only half a day, however, negotiations had collapsed, and they had been pursued by the Kaminoans’ small yet heavily weaponed cruisers since.

Tom raised his hand. Kathryn looked over at him, bottom lip quirking as if she was fighting a smile—he never looked more like a cocky schoolboy than when he raised his hand during debriefings—then nodded for him to speak.

“We chose the third planet to orbit partly because of its unusual magnetic field, which hid us from sensors, right? Well, I asked Harry to run a system-wide scan for anything that might also provide a dampening effect on sensors, just in case we had any unwelcome visitors. Though his report wasn’t fully complete as of last night, he did find that more than half of the asteroids in the nearby asteroid belt contain a mineral that he thought might have been the cause of the planet’s scrambling effect. It wouldn’t be nearly as effective as orbiting the planet, but if we move _Voyager_ into the asteroid belt, it may help to hide us from any unwanted eyes.”

For the first time that morning, Chakotay saw Kathryn Janeway smile. “Well done, both of you,” she said, making sure that Harry saw and felt her gaze. “Let’s do it.

“Anything else?”

The Doctor, joining them on the conference room screen, cleared his throat. “This is a reminder that all personnel who were subjected to more than thirty seconds of unimpeded solar light will need to visit Sickbay twice a day for the next week for anti-radiation treatment. That means all of you except for B’Elanna.” His gaze lingered an extra few seconds on Kathryn, who seemed oblivious to his look, and Chakotay hoped he would not be forced to drag her down to Sickbay. He knew he probably would.

Kathryn looked around the table, and when no one else made a move to say anything, she stood. “Dismissed.”

Everyone rose and began to shuffle about, gathering padds and moving towards the doors. Chakotay also stood, and turned to speak to Kathryn—only to find that she had already left her seat, and was approaching Harry. He let her go and gathered up his own things, though he watched out of the corner of his eye as she put a gentle hand on the young ensign’s shoulder, halting him for a few words.

Chakotay left before they had finished speaking. He did not want to lurk, and even though he wished—needed—to speak with Kathryn, preferably in private, her ready room would be just as good of a place to do so as the conference room. Better, even, he told himself as he settled into his seat at the center of the bridge.

Tom was already back at the con, and was turning _Voyager_ ’s listing nose toward the outer reaches of the solar system. The hum of the impulse engines threaded weakly through the deck as he brought them online, and then they were moving forward at a slow but steady crawl.

By the time Kathryn joined him on the bridge, the asteroid belt was in sight. It was a long and thick band of shadow against the far-distant stars, a strand of rolling stone and ice that stood out against the blackness of space and hid the system’s outer, gaseous planets from view.

Kathryn lowered herself into her chair stiffly. Chakotay glanced over at her—and once more, he took in her rumpled uniform, her tangled and sweat-sticky hair, her pale skin. It still held a shade of unnatural pink, despite her pallor, even though the Doctor had treated her burns at the same time as the rest of the bridge crew, and her freckles stood out in sharp relief across the bridge of her nose.

A ghost of a frown tugged at Chakotay’s heart. The question which he needed to address with her grew in his mind, sending small roots of worry into his heart and the first tendrils of concern tingling down into his fingers. He wondered why he hadn’t seen the warning signs before.

 _Because your entire ship was about to be destroyed,_ the logical part of his mind whispered. He ignored it.

He waited until they were safely in the asteroid belt, _Voyager_ ’s groaning hulk drifting in steady cadence with the slow dance of the rocks all about her, to turn to Kathryn. “Might I have a word?” he asked, voice low and quiet, pitched just loud enough for her to hear and no louder.

She jerked, as if startled by his voice, and glanced at him. “Is it urgent?” she asked, leaning a little over the armrest and console separating them.

Chakotay looked at her. He saw the thin film of sweat gathered on her brow, the pale flush of her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes. “Maybe,” he said.

Kathryn Janeway quirked an eyebrow at him, lifted a corner of her mouth, and said, “Well, until you decide whether it’s urgent or not, I have other matters to attend to that definitely _are_ time sensitive.” Her voice carried a teasing lilt, but Chakotay did not miss the sour note beneath her tone, the dissonant cord of strain that echoed in her eyes—in eyes that did not laugh as was their wont when she teased him, but remained cold and still and empty but for her command mask.

She did not give him time to respond, or even to finish compiling his thoughts, before rising abruptly from her chair. Sparing only one final, parting glance down at him, she disappeared toward OPS, questions in the soft tone she used when not giving commands already dripping from her lips.

Within moments she was gone from the bridge, heading toward Engineering, leaving Chakotay in silent, expectant command of the ship.

He did not see her again until after Beta shift had ended.

Tired, body aching and head throbbing, Chakotay was on his way to the messhall for a late dinner when saw her. She was walking in the opposite direction, hair falling out of its bun to dust the sides of her face, a case Chakotay suspected was filled with tools and pads in one hand, her expression set in narrow concentration; she didn’t even seem to realize he was there until Chakotay stepped directly in front of her, putting out a hand to halt her before she could walk into him.

“Commander.”

Her greeting was stiff and disconcertingly formal, and she tried to pull away before he could respond. Chakotay’s hand, resting on her left shoulder, tightened, pulling her to a standstill. She froze, but then allowed him to push her back in front of him.

“What can I do for you, Chakotay?” she asked, this time with resignation.

“You’ve been avoiding me.” It was not a question, but a realization.

“No.”

It was a lie, and they both knew it.

“What’s going on, Kathryn?” Chakotay asked. Again his fingers tightened on her shoulder, holding her still when she tried to pull away. If he let her go now, it would be another day before he was able to talk to her, at least—and he didn’t feel like he had a day to spare. “Kathryn, what’s wrong?” he pressed, taking half a step forward. His encroaching presence forced her to look up at him, and her eyes flashed when they met his, in demand, challenge, and layered beneath it, dismay.

“What do you think is wrong, Commander?” she snapped. “My crew was almost killed today, and my ship is holding atmosphere only with tape, spit, and prayer.”

Chakotay’s eyebrows crept up. If he had to guess, B’Elanna was the one who had said that, but to hear Kathryn repeat it was something of a shock. To hear her say the words with an edge of bitter anger was even more surprising; if she was anything, Kathryn was a forced optimist: a woman who had learned that the only way to encourage and inspire her crew was to profess the belief that all was better or more certain than it was.

“Kathryn, what’s wrong?” Chakotay asked again.

She was silent for a long second, then she took a short step back and, at last pulling away from Chakotay’s hold—he could sense she was no longer about to flee, and so relaxed his grip—lifted a hand to run down her face. A groan escaped her lips, slid through her fingers like the broken notes of an accordion, which was then chased by a sigh.

“I’m just tired, Chakotay,” she said at last, dropping her hand and looking up at him once more. “I didn’t sleep well last night, and then today… Well, you understand.”

Chakotay forced a mirthless smile. “I do.” And he did—he too was tired, the exhaustion of the late night and the stressful day buried down to his bones. But there was more to it than mere exhaustion, he thought—felt, suspected.

Glancing up and down the corridor to ensure that they were alone, and no crewmembers were about to walk into their conversation, Chakotay stepped forward closer again, and once more reached out to take hold of Kathryn’s shoulder. She flinched, almost imperceptibly, at his touch, but she did not pull away.

“Are you sure there’s nothing else?” Chakotay asked. He looked down at her, silently demanded that she meet his gaze, dared her to lie to him. “You were in your ready room this morning, but didn’t come out onto the bridge until _after_ I was there—and I had come all the way from my quarters. And, no offense, but you looked like hell even before you made it out.”

 _You still looked beautiful, though,_ the treacherous voice in Chakotay’s mind whispered. He quashed it, smothering that line of thought before it could prove distracting.

“I’m fine, Chakotay,” Kathryn said. She met his eyes—and in turn, she silently dared him to challenge her, to question her statement, to deny her honesty.

Chakotay laughed inwardly. What did he do but challenge her, but question her decisions, but deny her honesty when it came to her personal health. Did she not realize that she was, in this very moment, trying to deny him all of what it meant for him to be her commander? Her _friend_?

Chakotay breathed out a sigh, and let his hand slide from her shoulder. “Have you at least eaten today?”

Kathryn laughed, brittle and short but finally, truly amused, and this time it was her who reached out to touch him. Her hand was warm through his shirt. “While I can sometimes appreciate it, your mother hen act can be very irritating, Chakotay. I’m _fine_ ,” she said again. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

And then she was gone, breezing around Chakotay and striding purposefully down the hall, tool- and padd-filled case swinging at her side, shoulders tense and head high.

 _She’s not fine_ , Chakotay thought, turning and watching her disappear around the corner. She was too certain, and not tired enough, for all her act of exhaustion; she was hiding something—from the crew, from him, probably from herself.

Chakotay just hoped he could find out what that was before any real damage was done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback - even just a simple "I liked it" (or even "I didn't like it," I guess?) - would be really appreciated.


	3. Part III: Iracundia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's up so late; today was crazy. I hope you enjoy all the same - and that all of you had a better weekend than I did.

Part III: Iracundia 

Kathryn was already there when Chakotay arrived on the bridge the next morning.

She looked better than she had the night before. It was obvious that she had showered and changed uniforms. Her hair was once more neatly braided and pinned, and the wrinkles and stains that Chakotay had seen, if not registered, when he had stopped her in the hall, were absent from her clothes now.

As Chakotay sat in his chair, however, and took the time to really look at her, the uncomfortable unease that had been gnawing at his stomach since the morning before yawned wide and dark. The dark circles beneath her eyes had darkened to gaunt bruises overnight and her skin was sickly white, the only color in her face a feverish blush high on her cheeks.

Sickly. Feverish.

Like a punch in the gut, Chakotay knew what was wrong.

“You’re sick.”

Kathryn looked at him sharply, her head jerking around as quickly as if she had been slapped. She did not speak, but her expression—flat eyes, hard mouth, jutting chin—told him all that he needed to know. He was right, and she was angry that he knew.

 _Not now_ , her glare told him. _Not here_.

Not on the bridge, in the view of the crew, where attentive ears listened as hard as they could for any shred of gossip or rumor. Not where her crew could learn that she was as human—as fallible, as weak, as mortal—as they were.

It was nearly lunch before Kathryn stood to go to her ready room. “You have the bridge, Commander,” she said, throwing him a warning look before turning away. He watched her go, one hand balled into a fist on the armrest of his chair, the other tapping an irritated tempo against his thigh.

He waited an hour before going after her.

She was seated behind her desk, her computer open and reports scattered around it. A mug sat by her elbow, steaming gently, and Chakotay could smell the bitter taint of coffee in the air as he stepped into the room.

The door closed behind him, and Kathryn looked up.

“What can I do for you, Commander?” she asked, sitting back in her chair and folding her hands primly atop her desk.

“You’re sick.”

A beat. Then, “You’re being very blunt today,” Kathryn commented. Her gaze, fever-bright and chilly, did not waver.

“You haven’t given me much of a choice.”

Her eyes slid half shut in a look of barely constrained anger. “So is that why you thought it appropriate to mention it on the bridge?”

“I know you’re angry, but—”

“But what, Commander?” Kathryn snapped, abruptly standing. If she wavered, Chakotay could barely tell; she leaned forward, gripping the edge of her desk with white-knuckled fingers, and glared her irritation and her anger.

“But you didn’t give me much of a choice,” Chakotay said, fighting his own rising ire. _She’s sick_ , he reminded himself. _She’s going to be short-tempered._

“I’m just sick, Commander. A cold, nothing more. Hardly befitting this attitude of yours.”

Chakotay took a deep breath, and forced down the desire to grab her shoulders and give her a good shake. Sometimes she was too damn stubborn for her own good. “It is my job, as your commander,” he said slowly, carefully, biting each word to keep them from coming out too harshly, “to ensure that you remain fit for duty. Do you deny that?”

“No,” Kathryn said, shortly. “But as my friend and my commander, I expect you to honor my privacy as well as my status as captain of this ship. That includes not bringing up my cold on the bridge for the entire crew to hear.”

“If I hadn’t, would we be having this conversation?”

“That’s not the point, Commander.”

“No, it’s exactly the point. You’ve been trying to hide this from the beginning,” Chakotay said, taking a step toward her and her desk, “and if I had given you the chance, you’d still be hiding it. Or trying to hide it at least. I took away that chance.”

“In a flagrant and unprofessional display of disregard for my privacy, as well as for the demands of a Captain,” Kathryn retorted.

“You can’t just keep pretending you’re fine, Kathryn,” Chakotay said, taking another step forward. Very suddenly, he felt almost as if he was pleading.

“It’s just a cold, Commander.”

Chakotay grit his teeth. “Have you been to see the Doctor?” he asked at last.

A long beat of silence.

“That’s what I thought.”

“I don’t need to go see the Doctor, Commander,” Kathryn said, her chin jutting forward and her eyes flashing. “My mother would send me to school when I was sicker than I am now—and perfect attendance holds hardly a candle to the demands of captaining this ship.”

Chakotay looked at her—truly looked at her, for the first time since walking into her ready room and their argument. He saw her flushed face, saw the fierceness with which she gripped the edge of her desk, saw the way she tensed to keep the chills wracking her body from being visible. Something in him deflated. He sighed, and then said softly, “I’m just worried. You and I both know you don’t take care of yourself very well even on a good day.”

Her expression softened at that, and the tension in the room bled away like sand through closed fingers. Her eyes flicked down for a heartbeat, and her chin sank out of its challenging jut. “I’m fine,” she said after a few long seconds of staring down at her desk, looking up to meet his eyes once more and offering half a quiet smile. “I promise you, Chakotay. I’ll be better in a few days.”

“At least leave duty a few hours early,” Chakotay suggested. “Get some extra sleep.”

Kathryn shook her head. “We’ll see,” she said, and Chakotay knew that was as good as he was going to get. At least she hadn’t outright refused him.

She raised her eyebrows then, and asked, “If that is all?” At Chakotay’s silence, she nodded at the door. “Then you’re dismissed.”

Chakotay turned and left, returning to his post on the bridge. He felt better now than he had since he had been rudely awoken the morning before, the gnawing pit of worry settling into only an uncomfortable rumble.

As he sat, however, and caught sight of the captain’s empty chair beside him, something uneasy stirred in his chest.

 _She wasn’t being completely honest with you,_ a voice whispered in his mind. _She’s not as okay as she’s convinced you she is._

Chakotay glanced toward the door to her ready room, and offered up a silent prayer to the spirits that the woman hiding beyond them would be all right, just as she had promised.


	4. Part IV: Pavor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in posting. I hope y'all will appreciate the irony as much as I have, but I've been incredibly sick (with the flu) for the last couple of days, and haven't been able to do much except watch TV and sleep (and even only barely that). I will say, though, that it's been a great learning experience as well as inspiration for this story. Which I realize now is kind of sad maybe, that my big takeaway from this is "Now I can write this fanfic better!", but ah well.

Part IV: Pavor

Lieutenant Tom Paris dropped his plate on the table opposite Chakotay. “Mind if we join you?” he asked, and then sat without waiting for a reply. Behind him, Ensign Kim shuffled back and forth for a few seconds, glancing from the back of Tom’s head to Chakotay, before sitting slowly in the chair beside Tom.

Chakotay, a spoon of leola root stew halfway to his lips, looked up from the padd by his elbow and leveled an unwelcoming stare at his new-come companions. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?” he asked, returning the spoon to the bowl.

"We were just wondering—” Tom glanced at Harry, who gave the barest hint of a grimace and nod, urging him on. “—wondering what was wrong with the Captain.”

“Wrong with the Captain?” Chakotay repeated. He felt his fingers go a little numb, and a small tooth of irritated worry bite into the pit of his stomach—though the uneasy sensation could also be from the leola stew, he reasoned. “What do you mean?”

Tom pulled a face, a twisted paradigm of a pig’s snort, and even Harry’s reticence cracked to reveal a sliver of impatience.

“I’m pretty sure you know just what we mean,” Tom said shortly. He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the table. “Ever since that solar storm, she hasn’t been quite…right.”

Chakotay let out a long, slow sigh and sat back in his chair. He folded his hands in his lap, and smoothed his expression into one befitting a patient commanding officer. “And you agree with Tom, Harry?” he asked, looking at the young ensign.

Harry hesitated, looking once more to Tom, before saying, “Well, yeah. She’s been quieter than normal, and she just—she doesn’t look good.”

 _So much for me being the one to blow the whistle on her,_ Chakotay thought with a touch of dry amusement. _Seems you did that just fine on your own, Kathryn._ Not, though, that she would ever be willing to admit that, Chakotay knew.

“Does anyone else share your sentiments?” Chakotay asked.

“Sure,” Tom said, with a half-aborted shrug of his narrow shoulders. The movement made him look like a bird about to lean out of his chair and take to flight. “I mean, no one’s really talking about it, but people are worried.”

Chakotay fought to keep from rubbing his temples. “I see.”

“Well?” It was Harry who spoke, to Chakotay’s mild surprise.

In a moment of brash resolution, Chakotay made his choice.

He leaned forward once more, lowered his voice, and confessed, “The Captain’s not feeling well. It’s nothing serious,” he assured them quickly. “She’ll be fine in a couple of days.”

Tom and Harry nodded slowly, their eyes wide. Neither of them had known the indomitable Kathryn Janeway to be sick before—and though he was loath to admit it, Chakotay realized then, watching something in their eyes break and reform, that Kathryn was painfully right. She was more than human to her crew; she was the Captain, and captains were meant to stand above their crew, meant to be great, meant to be more than simply mortal. Both Tom and Harry had seen her wounded before, had seen her exhausted, and worn to the bone, and barely able to stand from bloodless and sleep deprivation. But there was nothing quite so humanizing as realizing that their captain was afflicted with something so common as sickness.

“I tell you both this not so that you can go tell everyone,” Chakotay hurried on, fixing both of the young men with hard almost-glares. “This stays between the three of us. I told you two this so that you can help minimize any rumors—or concern—the crew might spawn. I know you two,” and he looked at Tom and raised his eyebrows, “are at the heart of the gossip factory on this ship.

“Chakotay,” Tom said with a gasp, placing a hand over his heart as if struck.

Chakotay’s eyebrows crept another fraction of an inch up his forehead. “Tom.”

A beat, wherein Tom opened his mouth as if to argue—only to receive a gentle tap in his side from one of Harry’s elbows. Then, “Okay fine. Don’t worry. We’ll help.”

“The Captain doesn’t want this getting out,” Chakotay said. “If she knew I’d even told you two, she’d have me flayed.”

Tom grinned. “Don’t worry,” he said again. This time, though, he sounded sincere.

“The secret’s safe with us,” Harry added.

“It’d better be,” Chakotay warned.

Chakotay watched the two friends leave, carrying their food with them to a larger table where B’Elanna and the Delaney sisters met them a few minutes later.

His appetite soured, Chakotay cleared his table and left the mess hall. He walked through the corridors for an aimless minute, lost in his thoughts and the tooth buried in his stomach. When he reached the turbolift, though, he paused. He felt the weight of the padd in his hand, and the metal fasteners holding his pin of command against his neck, and the tightness in his legs and back and bones from the long day. Standing in the sudden, cool silence of the corridor, with the hum of the engines beneath his feet and the hush of the air vents above him, Chakotay’s skin pricked and sparked with a flare of remembered pain—of white light scorching, of blisters rising and bursting.

“You may experience some phantom pains for a few days,” the Doctor had told him, and the rest of the bridge crew, after treating their solar burns. “Thanks to me you won’t have any nerve damage, but nerves really don’t appreciate being scorched.”

Chakotay wondered if Kathryn had been to see the Doctor for her radiation treatment that day. He doubted it.

Mind made up, Chakotay stepped into the turbolift, and ordered, “Deck three.”

There was no answer when Chakotay rang the chime at Kathryn’s door. He waited for a long thirty seconds, then rang it again. Again, no answer.

Chakotay frowned. He took step away from her door, telling himself she was in bed or in the bath, and he shouldn’t be bothering her.

He took a step back toward her door. Lifted a hand to ring the chime again. Hesitated.

 _Don’t infringe on her personal space,_ Chakotay told himself sternly. _She won’t appreciate your hovering._

He turned, and was halfway to his own door when the tooth of worry grew into a jaw. It seized his gut, clenching his stomach between teeth of uncertainty. He stopped, feet anchoring to the floor, his entire spirit and body shrieking in silent warning.

_Wrong way._

The words echoed through his mind, through his bones, through his blood. His breath came hard and fast against his lips, and his nails bit into his palms. The jaw sank its teeth deeper, and deeper still, until his stomach clenched in an anxious vice.

He and Kathryn were close—closer than he had been to anyone in his life, save perhaps his sister Sekaya. He and Kathryn knew each other’s minds, each other’s thoughts and feelings. Reading her was like breathing, knowing her like smiling.

Something was wrong. He _knew_ something was wrong.

It was time to stop ignoring his instincts.

“Computer,” Chakotay called out, turning back, “locate Captain Janeway.”

_[Captain Janeway is in her ready room.]_

Chakotay stood, rooted to the spot for a fraction of a second. Then a curse, and a burst of energy, and he was all but running.

There was no answer to the chime at her ready room door—just as there hadn’t been when he had tried to go to see her at the end of his shift, to make certain she left the bridge. There was no answer to the frantic pounding of his fist against the door, either.

He tried the door panel. Nothing. He rang the chime, and pounded again.

“Dammit, Kathryn,” Chakotay pleaded, soft and nearly silent beneath his breath. “Answer the damn door.”

Silence.

“Computer, override privacy lock on Captain’s ready room, authorization code Chakotay Alpha Tango Five Eight Nine.”

_[Privacy lock overridden.]_

The door slid open on silent runners. Chakotay stepped inside.

On the floor, halfway to the couch beneath the viewport, lay Kathryn.

She appeared to be unconscious, though her eyes were slit open just enough for Chakotay to catch a glimpse of glassy blue and bloodshot white as he knelt beside her. She lay half on her side, half on her stomach, one hand caught beneath her chest unable to reach her commbadge, the other stretched out as if she had tried to pull herself forward. Her skin was ash-white and scorching dry, like bone and acid and plaster. When he touched her, he could not help but hiss—with expected pain, with sympathy—for her skin seared his palms.

She was burning.

As he rolled her over, her hand fell against his leg. He pressed a cool palm against her cheek, already reaching for his commbadge, murmuring again and again, “It’s going to be alright, Kathryn. I’m getting you to the Doc.”

Her fingers tangled in his pant leg. Her lips moved.

Chakotay hesitated. He told himself it wasn’t just a trick of his mind, desperate for her to be all right.

He leaned down.

“Kathryn?” He barely dared to breathe. “Kathryn, are you with me?”

She moved, her fingers twisting against his leg, her head tilting half an angle so she could look at him. Her breath labored in her chest, dry and hot and rattling. Her lips moved again.

“You came.” Her voice was less than a whisper and little more than silence. “You—”

She fell limp.

Chakotay slapped his commbadge. “Chakotay to Sickbay. Medical emergency. Two to beam out.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd love to hear your thoughts!


	5. Part V: Metus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically it's still Saturday where I live, so technically I'm not late. This chapter's only been very briefly (read: sketchily) edited, though - I'm so sorry. Also, I hope you all appreciate the amount of research I did on fever cooling techniques today; I really didn't learn anything new (boo!), but I did manage to give myself a headache trying to slog through a bunch of medical research about cooling methods for hyperthermia (which wasn't even really what I needed, so double boo!). Anyway, I'm really tired so I'm going to bed. (You all don't even need to know that? Oh well.) 
> 
> I hope you enjoy.

Part V: Metus

“What do you fear, Kathryn?”

The world all around her was dark. She turned, feet planted on shadow, lungs drawing in darkness with quick, shallow breaths that she fought to control.

“Where am I? Who are you?”

A long sigh of silence. The darkness lay still, a flat, depthless eternity on every side.

 Then, “Tell me, Kathryn. What do you fear?”

“Who are you?” she demanded, spinning on her heel again, trying—and failing—to pierce the darkness, to see who it was that spoke, to see where it was she stood.

A silent sigh, which shook the wreath of shadows. “You always were a stubborn woman. Very well: you may call me Virgil.”

Kathryn narrowed her eyes—a pointless gesture in the darkness, but one that made her feel herself. “Virgil,” she repeated. “As in the Roman poet?”

Silence.

“Fine. Virgil,” she fought to temper her irritation, to keep her tone as free of condescension as she could, “why am I here?”

"Tell me, Kathryn, what do you fear?”

“Why,” Kathryn snapped, balling her hands into impotent fists by her sides, “do you want to know what I fear? What does that accomplish? Who _are_ you?”

“I am Virgil.”

“So you’ve said.” She took a long, steadying breath. “But who _are_ you? I have yet to see your face, or your form.”

“What do you fear, Kathryn?”

She clenched her jaw to keep from screaming. “Why do you hide?” she ground out instead. “How can I trust any being who is not even willing to show me their face?”

“I have none,” came the calm reply. “Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“No. Now, Kathryn, what do you fear?”

Her nails bit into her palms, small crescents of burning pain. “I don’t fear you.”

“Of course you don’t. But surely you must fear something.”

“No.”

“You are a poor liar, Kathryn.”

She fought to swallow a scathing retort. She failed. “So are you,” she said. “There are few I cannot lie to—and you are not one of the few.” She thought of Chakotay, and of Tuvok, and of her father.

Another sigh—and with it, a crystalline ripple of the darkness. “Very well, Kathryn. We will do this the hard way.”

And then she was falling.

 

~*x*~

 

“Please state the nature of— What happened?”

Chakotay looked up from where he knelt on the Sickbay floor, bones still tingling from the aftereffects of the transporter. The Doctor hurried forward, not waiting for Chakotay to answer, his lined face stamped with surprised, wide-eyed concern. A medical tricorder was already in one hand.

“I found her on her ready room floor,” Chakotay said, scrambling up and back to give the Doctor plenty of room. “She’s burning up.”

“Of course she is,” the Doctor snapped. The tricorder wailed in alarm. “Her temperature is 41 degrees Celsius. Help me get her on a biobed.”

Chakotay returned to Kathryn’s side and, while the Doctor hovered, still taking readings and mumbling to himself, Chakotay scooped his captain into his arms and carried her to the central biobed. It was, according to everyone but Neelix, the most comfortable one.

The panel slid up and over her, a black carapace that hid all but her neck and pale face. Her head lolled to the side, eyes closed and jaw clenched.

“What’s wrong with her?” Chakotay asked.

“Not now, Commander,” the Doctor said tersely, and then strode away, holographic mind already spinning a dozen lightyears ahead.

Chakotay held his breath, then let it out on a long count of seven. He stood barely touching the edge of the bed, the knuckles of his right hand resting lightly by her head. The longing to reach out and brush the hair away from her forehead ached in his wrist, in his fingers—and after a long three seconds, he gave in.

She was even hotter than she had been when he knelt by her on her ready room floor.

“Spirits, Kathryn,” Chakotay murmured, running the palm of his hand over her hair. “Why didn’t you leave early like I told you to? Why do you have to be so damn stubborn?”

She didn’t answer him. He didn’t need her to.

The bustle of the Doctor’s footsteps warned of his return. Chakotay looked up, and saw him coming back with an armful of hyposprays and other various medical equipment Chakotay had no name for, and a very dark look on his face. Chakotay’s stomach twisted uneasily.

“First thing’s first,” the Doctor said, laying his equipment down on a nearby try. “We need to get her temperature down. I’ve called for Kes, but until she gets here, you’re going to have to help me, Commander.”

“Anything,” Chakotay said instantly.

The biobed’s panel slid down at the touch of a button, and the Doctor handed Chakotay a laser scalpel. “Make sure the blade’s on its lowest setting, and keep it at least two centimeters from her skin.”

“What?” Chakotay asked, feeling dumb.

The Doctor pressed the laser scalpel into his hand. “Her clothes, Commander,” he snapped. “Leave her undergarments, but the rest need to come off.”

Chakotay’s fingers closed around the scalpel. “Right,” he said, his mouth and throat suddenly very dry.

He started with her boots, pulling them and then her socks from her feet and dumping them on the floor. Then her pants: he unclasped them gingerly, his fingers feeling very large and clumsy, and then slid them down over her hips. She was so small, he thought, carefully easing the cloth away from her skin, that her waist would almost fit in his hands.

 _This is not how I imagined undressing you, Kathryn,_ he thought wryly, and dropped the discarded pair of pants on top of her boots.

Her uniform jacket joined the growing pile a few seconds later. When he reached the turtleneck, however, Chakotay realized he was going to need the scalpel the Doctor had given him. He slowly picked it up from where he’d dropped it on the biobed mattress and, holding his breath, he turned it on and readjusted the scalpel length and intensity to its minimal setting, as the Doctor had instructed.

The idea of using the scalpel so close to his captain’s skin was unsettling. One wrong or careless move and he would cut her. His hands were steady enough to gut and skin a rabbit—but that was with a traditional knife; he had never handled a laser scalpel before, save for once when he had cut off a man’s hand to free him from a Cardassian shackle, and once to cut a prisoner’s implant out of a Bajoran woman’s thigh. In both cases it hadn’t mattered if he did damage; in both cases, the damage was the point.

Not here, though. Not now. Not on her.

“What’s taking so long, Commander?”

The Doctor’s voice cut through Chakotay’s thoughts. He glanced up, and saw the Doctor frowning at him.

“Commander, this isn’t the time for dallying—or for some manly display of chivalry. Get her clothes off _now_ , and then get to the replicator and get a gallon of cool water, sponges, and at least five icepacks.”

Chakotay shook his head—one quick, sharp jerk. “Of course,” he said, half a mumble and half a curse meant for himself, and looked back down in at the scalpel in his hand.

 _Do it,_ he told himself.

The mesh material, meant to protect from radiation and aid in scattering phaserfire, parted before the scalpel like water before a knife. It was, Chakotay thought as he cut through the last strip of cloth away from Kathryn’s neck, little different than gutting a rabbit.

 _She’s so small,_ he thought again, when the tattered halves of her tank at last joined the pile of clothes on the floor. She was always so large standing on the bridge, sitting behind her desk—even lounging on her couch, on the nights Chakotay joined her for dinner. She was larger than him, larger somehow than the ship. Larger, even, than life itself it sometimes seemed.

Yet there, lying more than half naked on the biobed, the Doctor moving about her head like a moth fluttering around a candle flame, the sharp white of her standard issue bra and underwear barely paler than her flesh, she seemed—human.

Chakotay pulled his gaze away and hurried for the replicator.

 _Idiot,_ he told himself. _Now is not the time for philosophical epiphanies._ Right now she needed him—his help, his support—and letting his mind wander would only keep him from the help she needed.

They were just finishing packing ice around Kathryn when Kes arrived. The Doctor must have already explained the situation, Chakotay decided, for Kes showed no signs of shock or dismay when she came in through the door, only deep, radiating concern.

“Ah, Kes, you’re here,” the Doctor exclaimed, with the first hint of a smile Chakotay had seen since he had arrived with Kathryn. “I need you to start sponging cool water on the captain’s bare skin. Commander,” he turned to look at Chakotay, who had stepped back in a hurry to make way for Kes, “I need you to go to the captain’s quarters and start preparing an ice bath. I know she has a tub, and we can transport her there if need be.”

“An ice bath?” he repeated slowly, staring hard in growing horror at the Doctor. “That borders on barbaric.”

“If her fever doesn’t come down, we won’t have much choice. But I hope we won’t have to use such a drastic measure.”

“Doctor, surely there’s another way.”

When he was very small, the oldest child of two of his parents’ friends had come down with a terrible fever overnight. The boy, only a year older than Chakotay, had been delirious within an hour. The village healer had decided that the only way to bring the fever down was with an ice bath. Chakotay could remember standing in the family’s living room while his parents helped the healer, holding the family’s youngest child by the hand and listening to the boy screaming.

He had died two days later from pneumonia.

“I will do what I deem necessary,” the Doctor said waspishly. He glanced up from the medical tricorder in his hand to glare at Chakotay—and then something in his expression softened fractionally. “She’ll be fine,” he said, with a hint of reassurance. “I’m a medical professional. I know what I’m doing, I assure you.”

Chakotay nodded. “I know you do, Doctor,” he said quietly. _It’s just that I can still remember that little boy’s screams,_ he added silently.

It’s just that I’m not sure I can bear to hear her scream like that, he did not add.

Chakotay turned on his heel and strode for the door. _Now is not the time for fear_ , he told himself, _or for doubt. The Doctor knows what he’s doing. You believe that_ , Chakotay reminded himself.

_You have to._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 41 degrees Celsius = 105.8 degrees Fahrenheit
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it, and I'd love to hear what you thought.


	6. Part VI: Ignisque Aquae

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been way, way too long since I updated. My sincerest apologies. Hopefully the writer's block, which was the main thing that was keeping me from writing and updating this, is now broken for good. Thus, hopefully there won't be a delay this long again. Again, my apologies.
> 
> Many thanks to tumblr user absynthe-minded, and fellow fanfic authors cheile and m_class for their help with and support of this chapter.
> 
>  
> 
> tumblr user absynthe-minded made a playlist for this fic, like the amazing person she is. You can listen to it on playmoss.com/en/absyntheminded/playlist/solis-febris  
> .

Part VI: De Igne Aquaque

 

Kathryn stood upon a balcony that overlooked a sparkling city square. A fountain burbled merrily, water pouring from a vase held in a dancing maiden’s hands, ferns and flowers blooming in the beds around the pool at her feet. Wrought iron benches sat looking into the fountain and its flowers, clawed feet resting on silver marble etched with gold.

It was all burning.

Kathryn turned, stumbling thoughts racing to catch up with her surroundings. She saw latticed windows and a mosaic floor, rose gold sconces that held half-burned candles and pots filled with bright plants. The sky was grey with ash and smoke, and beneath her, in the square, men and women and children ran from the flames.

They were all human. This, for a reason that was lost to mist as soon as she tried to grasp at it, seemed significant.

 _Out!_ Every instinct in her body screamed for her to get _out_ , away from the balcony and the three-meter drop to hard stone, which beckoned from beyond the wood-carved railing. But to do so, she realized as she turned again towards the building at her back, would require her to brave the flames.

It was, in the end, not a hard choice.

From within the depths of the building, she heard a scream—a child’s scream, wild and high and pitched with terror.

The spark-gnawed door leading out onto the balcony shattered against Kathryn’s shoulder, the latch, which glittered with heat, cracking out of the frame. She stumbled, the toes of her boots kicking up a flurry of embers and ash as she lost her balance. Smoke poured into her throat and up into her nose as she gasped, then coughed, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes in an instant.

Her training took hold. She lifted her left arm, covered her nose and mouth with the crook of her elbow, and forced her leaden legs to move. One step, two steps, three, into the fire-cast hell.

It was hot. So hot. The air ate her, dry and scorching, hungry. She coughed, on the smoke and on the heat, and she felt her skin blister. Her hair crackled. Her eyes burned. Her mouth and nose, even through her sleeve, scorched so that it was nearly impossible to breathe.

She was going to die. She was going to die, she was going to die, shewasgoingtodie.

 _Get out!_ her mind screamed. _Get out now!_

The child’s scream crescendoed, a wail and a shriek, terrified.

  _T_ _hree more steps,_ Kathryn told herself—her legs, her chest, her muscles and bones and blood. _Just three more steps._ And then three more, and three more, and three more.

The building would have been beautiful, Kathryn realized, small and distant, as she ducked through a collapsing, arched doorway, choking and unable to cry. Paint ran down the walls in long, blackening streaks, and the rich carpets underfoot spat and popped as sparks fell and caught amid the soft fibers. Artfully carved furniture sat, squat and fearful, in corners and along the walls: chests, stands holding burning flowers, shelves holding smoke-blacked vases and sagging pottery, tables covered in the drifting ash of vanished paper.

She reached the top of a wide staircase. The stairs before her burned; the balustrade to either side of her crumbled, a cacophony of cracking wood and spitting smoke, then a riot of crashes. Behind her came a rumble, and she turned just in time to watch as part of the ceiling tore free and fell, heavy and burning, to the hall floor.

Kathryn grit her teeth and clenched both her hands into fists. _There’s no turning back now,_ she told herself.

The child screamed a third time—closer this time than before, rising from the first floor on waves of eddying heat. And then the scream fell abruptly silent.

Kathryn threw herself forward.

The stairs dissolved beneath her feet and she fell. Wood and flame rose with reaching hands around her ankles, her knees, her hips, her chest and shoulders. She screamed. The air was empty and fragile and burning, unable to hold her. There was nothing—and everything—and for a flash of an instant, she thought she could see the whole world.

And then she hit the ground. Her head smashed into something hard, and she saw black, then white, then once again hell. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move. All she could do was burn.

Then, from somewhere close, a voice. And in that voice a word. “Please,” they said—screamed. And again, “Please!”

She rolled over, forcing cut and blistered hands beneath her. She cried out at the pain of ravaged flesh peeling against searing stone, at the pain of bruised ribs and lungs. Her legs ached, throbbed, stung. Her feet felt numb.

“Please,” the voice said with a sob.

She stood.

She tried to speak. She choked, on ash and smoke and pain. She tried to swallow—only her mouth was bone, her tongue wood. She coughed, and it was the dry, hacking rasp of a dying animal.

“ _Please_ ,” the voice said again.

She stumbled forward. The voice was near—nearer, she hoped, than death. She had to reach it. She had to. She—

The huddled form of a young child materialized before her through the smoke and flame. It sat huddled in the middle of the floor, the smoldering remains of a bed behind them in a corner beneath a window. The glass of the window was shattered, the wall and frame around it devoured.

 _Three more steps,_ she whispered, silently, to herself. One. Two. Three.

She knelt. The child looked up at her, dark and wide-eyed and terrified. There were no tears, only burns and soot and smoke. The child—was it a boy or a girl? She could not say—reached for her, palms blistered and fingers burned to the bone. “Please,” the child whispered.

She took the child’s hand in her own. Pulled the child close to her, wrapping them in her arms. “I’m here,” she whispered in return—or tried to whisper. She felt her lips move, but no sound made it past her lips. The child clung to her, and she realized it didn’t matter if they had heard her or not.

One arm under the child’s arm and behind their back. The other beneath their legs. Stand.

One step.

One step.

One step.

She was halfway to the window when the world tilted. The fire billowed, the smoke roared. The floor cracked, the ceiling cracked, the walls cracked. The flames reached for her, all hunger and need.

A beam, eaten through and alight, fell mere feet to her left. Sparks rose in a dizzying waltz where it landed, and heat sprang over her and the child in her arms. Then another beam fell. And another.

One step.

 _Crack_.

She looked up. The ceiling was alive; worms of red and orange and yellow crawled across the wooden planks and beams, gnawing and writhing. And as she watched it all sagged, worms and ceiling alike. It groaned.

The floor had swallowed her feet. She could not move. The child in her arms was lead and stone and iron. With the child weighing her down, she would not reach the window—not before the ceiling collapsed.

She looked down at the child. The child looked up at her.

She smiled.

Above them both, the ceiling looked down and groaned. Split. Fell.

She fell with it, curling down over the child in her arms. Elbows and knees struck the floor, but she felt no pain. Chin down, shoulders hunched, back arched, covering the child’s head and chest and legs.

_Thud._

She heard, more than felt, the ceiling strike her. She heard the crunch of wood and of bone, heard the tearing rip of fire, heard her own grunt of pain.

And then she burned, all of her, bone and muscle and flesh. It was in her, and on her, and all around her but beneath. She was flame itself, burning with heat so great it felt like ice. It swallowed her, like water, and she could not breathe for drowning.

The child beneath her grasped at her hand. Gripped her fingers in theirs. “Don’t leave me,” the child begged. Their voice was the murmur of a winter’s breeze. It scythed through the roar of the fire’s wind, cleaving it to fluttering shreds. “Hold on.”

She held the child’s hand— _his_ hand—and she burned, and she promised, silently, “I won’t.”

Then the cold swallowed her, and everything went black.

She opened her eyes.

 

~*x*~

 

Chakotay knelt against the edge of Kathryn’s tub, soaked and panting, head half-bowed and conscience drifting. The lukewarm water was cooling quickly on his left hand and arm, on his chest where his tank clung, sticky, to his chest, on his face where it mixed with the sweat beading on his forehead. His breath tasted stale and scared on his tongue and in the back of his throat. His right hand, submerged up to the wrist, ached with the first blush of bruising, and stung with the pain of five bloodied nail-marks dug into his knuckles.

His mind and his sight were lost in echoes—of her voice, of her face, of his name screamed hoarse and jagged from her lips. He felt her hand in his, nails digging into his skin, fingers bruising his knuckles, clinging desperately while she screamed and thrashed and he held her down; and he could feel her hand in his now, soft and limp and as bruised as his own.

A hand fell on his left shoulder. Then a familiar voice, sounding very far away, said softly, “Okay, Commander. I think we can take her out now.”

Chakotay blinked. His heart lodged in his throat as his breath hitched. His knees ached from the hard ground, and his hand stung, and he shivered against the water on his skin. The hollow, gnawing pain buried deep within his chest shattered and roared—and before Chakotay’s thoughts had caught up to his body, he was on his feet and bending down, over the tub.

If he had been soaked before, he was dripping in an instant. Her body was small—so small—and delicate in his arms, cradled against his chest as he lifted her free of the tub and the water that had made her beg for compassion. Her ribs and spine pressed against his arms through her skin, and as Chakotay carried her out of the bathroom and toward the towels draped over her bed, he realized for what felt like the first time just how skinny she was.

Too skinny. _How long has it been,_ Chakotay asked her silently, _since you last ate a proper meal?_

_Why are you so damn bad at taking care of yourself?_

A flash of scarlet anger. _This is your fault, Kathryn,_ Chakotay told her, still silent. _If you just took care of yourself like I told you to, this wouldn’t have happened._

But that was unfair of him. Mostly, anyway.

“Dammit, Kathryn,” Chakotay murmured—though what exactly he was damning her for, he wasn’t so certain of.

He laid her down on top of the towels. Her small, wet body sunk down into the mattress, the straggles of her wet hair clinging to her skin and making her eyes and cheeks look hollower than they were. Her hand remained fastened in his, her fingers clutching at his knuckles, but her head lolled weakly.

It was but a moment’s work to dry her skin and rub the water out of her hair with the towels piled atop their twins at the foot of the bed. Her skin was still damp, her hair still tangled and sticky with moisture, but she was no longer dripping wet.

With a firm, quick movement, Chakotay lifted her up with one arm, and with the other whisked the water-logged towels out from under her. They fell in a rumpled pile by his knee, limp and soggy, and almost instantly began to soak the right pants leg. He ignored it, focusing on lowering Kathryn gently back down to her bed. She still wore her bra and underwear, but Chakotay intended to let Kes take care of that when she arrived from Sickbay.

Chakotay knelt, reached a tentative hand out to cup one cold-flushed cheek. “It’s over now,” he murmured to her. He watched her shiver, saw the goose flesh that rose across her neck and shoulders where his warm breath brushed her. “It’s done.”

“Commander?”

The Doctor’s voice was a hammer against Chakotay’s ears. He startled, looking sharply up at the holographic man that he found standing at his shoulder. He had neither heard nor seen him approach, though by the pinched expression etched into the lines of his face, the Doctor had not been quiet about it.

Chakotay suddenly realized that his left hand was still touching his captain’s face. He jerked it away, as if he had been scalded, and stood abruptly. Kathryn clutched at him, and as he pulled his right hand free of hers, he heard—barely discernible, barely audible over the thud of his own heartbeat and the whisper of the recycled air humming from the vents—her give a small, aching mewl.

 Chakotay’s heart twisted into his throat, and in that moment, all he wanted to do was lay down on the bed and pull her into his arms where he could soothe away the pain.

“Yes, Doctor?” Chakotay said, wrenching his mind away from his pain and yearning.

The Doctor hummed, deep in the back of his throat, and flipped open the medical tricorder he carried. Chakotay’s head jerked back, as if the tricorder were a viper. “Doc—,” he began, only to be cut off by The Doctor clucking his tongue disapprovingly.

“I thought so,” the Doctor said. His eyes were fathomless and infinite in a way that made Chakotay’s mind reel, endless eons of light bound together and harnessed to give the impression of sight, eternal in their view and piercing in their knowing—and then The Doctor blinked, and he was simply The Doctor once more. “Commander,” he said, all brisk business and curt bedside manner, “you’re in shock.”

It was Chakotay’s turn to blink. He looked at The Doctor, brain, still reeling from the odd moment with the hologram’s eyes and the sound and sigh of Kathryn so wretched, struggling and failing to understand what he had just been told. “What?”

The Doctor’s eyebrows rose. “Shock,” he said again. “You are in shock.” He pursed his lips and regarded Chakotay for a long three seconds. Then, bluntly, he said, “I think you should leave this to me and Kes for now. Go take a shower. Get some food if you haven’t yet, and then go to sleep.”

“But,” Chakotay protested, not knowing exactly how he was meaning to convince The Doctor that he was still needed but driven to do so with every fiber of bone and blood. “But won’t you need—”

"Kes and I can handle it,” The Doctor said, cutting him off. “And if not, we will summon you or Mr. Tuvok.”

“But,” Chakotay tried again. This time it was him who cut himself off. He sighed, understanding finally settling down through his chest and into his stomach with the weight of a lodestone. “Fine,” he said stiffly, after a long second of staring at The Doctor. “But if you need help, call me, not Tuvok.”

It wasn’t that Chakotay didn’t trust the Vulcan; in fact, Chakotay would trust his life, and Kathryn’s, with him. Chakotay suspected that Tuvok knew just as much—if not more—about Kathryn, and her life, than he did. That, though, was a sore spot that Chakotay refused to call jealousy—and that, in the moment, was part of the problem.

Earlier in the day Kathryn had chewed into Chakotay for bringing her weakness even possibly to the attention of the crew. The Doctor and Kes were already involved; Chakotay did not want anyone else involved. Not until Kathryn was doing better, and this was merely a haunting nightmare lost to memory.

 That included Tuvok.

Again The Doctor looked at Chakotay with a long, hard, and unreadable expression. But then he nodded. “Very well, Commander,” he said, tone just as stiff as Chakotay’s had been a moment before.

Chakotay nodded. He glanced at Kathryn, small and pale and still shivering, and once more fought the desire to pull her into his arms and smooth the trembling out of her limbs. He glanced at The Doctor, watching him with eyes that were far too knowing.

“Good night, then, Doctor,” he said.

“Good night, Commander,” The Doctor said.

Chakotay felt his eyes following him as he disappeared through Kathryn’s sitting room, and out into the hall. _Somehow_ , Chakotay thought, as he turned toward his own quarters just down the hall, _I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep tonight._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoy, and I'd love to hear your thoughts - especially given the long update-time, and the fact that the tone of the fic is shifting due to the fact that I'm finally getting out of set-up and into the meat of it. Also, if you want me to start putting very specific trigger warnings on each chapter, let me know, otherwise I'll just use my own discretion for what will need trigger warnings.


	7. Part VII: Vita Principi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, look at this: an update after only a week! I'm quite proud of myself, not going to lie. Enjoy!

Chapter VII: Vita Principi

Everything hurt.

Kathryn drifted in and out of consciousness, borne on nebulous waves of heat and pain and cold. There were voices to either side of her, soft and emotional—though she could not seem to understand either their words or what emotion it was that colored their tones. Her left hand ached with the deep, purple pain of layered bruises, and she wondered through thick webs of exhaustion what had happened to bruise her so badly. She had only vague, hazy recollections of sudden cold, and hands, and more voices speaking over her agony.

It reminded her of something. Something she didn't like to remember. So she didn't remember it.

Instead she opened her eyes, and tried to understand where she was.

She wasn't where she expected to be—though as that thought filtered through her aching mind, she found she was not sure where she expected to be. All she knew was that she expected to see white ceiling and soothing, yellow light; that she expected to hear a lilting voice humming a long-ago composed melody that she half-knew, and to smell the crisp, clean scent of antiseptic and medicine kept in sterile bottles.

But there was only dark ceiling, and muted shadows steeped with dimmed light that she associated with late nights and an ever-pervasive headache. The air smelled like fresh coffee, and like stale coffee, and somewhere between that like old books and soap.

She was home. Or, at least, in her own quarters. She wasn't sure she could remember what "home" was right now.

_A wide room bathed with the flicker of a raging fire—_

_A two-story, shingled house sitting at the end of a long, wending drive lined with ash trees, with a roofed porch and a barn with peeling red paint and creaking doors half a mile farther—_

_Stars sliding past the viewport, bathing the moss-green couch with undulating silver shadows—_

_Blackness, above and below, before behind—_

"Easy now, Captain."

Kathryn blinked, and found herself staring up at two worried faces. One was male, with stern lines etched permanently into his forehead; the other was female, young and fair, with lips that seemed ready to smile at any second. It was the man who had spoken.

"Easy there." It was the man again. He smiled, seeing her eyes focus on his face. "Welcome back to the land of the conscious, Captain."

Kathryn frowned. _Captain_. The word felt like a hollow that had been carved in her throat, and then had been crammed full of something heavy and tangled and hard and rotting. She didn't like the feeling of it, even as it was as much a part of her as her heart, which fluttered against her ribs. It was inseparable from her; it _was_ her, whether she wanted it to be or not.

And, lying there, staring up at the worried man and the girl who looked at her with enough concern to fill a galaxy, she wasn't sure she wanted it gone.

"How are you feeling?" the man asked.

Kathryn frowned. Only then, as she frowned again, did she realize that her earlier frown had bled away.

How _did_ she feel, though? She felt…tired, and as if she had been wound with gauze. She felt hot, and cold, and yet numb. She felt everything and nothing, and beneath all of that, fear.

But fear of what? What was it that she was afraid of?

_A wide room bathed with the flicker of a raging fire—_

_Hands, and more hands, and voices that spoke words that she could not understand—_

_A man she knew—a man she knew better than she knew herself—looking at her over the console that separated them, eyes dark and warm and infinite—_

"Tired," Kathryn said. Her voice came out as a croak.

The man smiled. "I'm not surprised. You had a fever of 41 degrees."

"I… What?"

The man's expression darkened. He looked up and over at the girl standing beside him. "Kes," he said, addressing her, "I need you to run to Sickbay and—"

The rest of what he said faded out of Kathryn's hearing as his voice was replaced with a low, white hum. She shivered, and then reached up with her hands to cover her ears. It did nothing to ease the humming, however.

Fingers wrapped around her right wrist, and pulled her hand away from her ear. The man was watching her, and the girl was nowhere to be seen. His lips were moving, but Kathryn couldn't seem to hear what he was saying.

The humming swelled.

_Kathryn._

She shook. Her breath snagged in her throat. Her eyes burned, wide and staring. She wanted to speak, but her tongue was thick, heavy against the roof of her mouth, and the air in her lungs had shriveled.

_Kathryn…_

Her name was a sigh. A breath of wind in a windless space.

No, Kathryn said—or tried to say. No….

"Captain?" It was the man—The Doctor, she thought suddenly, he's The Doctor, that is his name—speaking. "Captain, what's wrong?"

She reached for him with her left hand. Tried to grab onto the front of his uniform, only for her fingers to slide over it as if it was glass. He looked down at her fingers scrabbling against his chest, and then reached quickly up and seized her hand.

"Captain?" he said, yet again. And then, in a tone she did not recognize, " _Kathryn_."

_Kathryn…_

_It is time. Come with me, Kathryn..._

The world tilted, spun, and slid out of focus. And then, with a silent gasp, Kathryn's eyes rolled into the back of her head, and the last thing she felt was her body going limp against the mattress of her bed.

 

~*x*~

 

Tom Paris was, for the first time in eight months and nineteen days, early for his shift. He stood waiting in the hall for the turbolift, bouncing on the balls of his feet and humming an old sailor's ditty—one of the many he had learned from a scarred and foul-mouthed sailor he had met in the penal colony back on Earth. The tune was simple, masking words that would make even lower deckhands' faces blush with a lilting melody.

When the turbolift opened, however, the song died a quick and painful death behind Tom's lips.

Commander Chakotay stood in the turbolift. He was leaning against the wall, arms crossed tightly over his chest and face turned toward the floor, hiding gaunt cheeks and bruised eyes from all but the sharpest sight. In the fraction of an instant it took for Chakotay to register Tom's presence, he thought he could see something dark and terrible resting on Chakotay's chest, weighing him down with a thousand gravities.

But then Chakotay straightened, and though his eyes remained bruised from lack of sleep and his skin remained pale with exhaustion, whatever it was that Tom had glimpsed was gone, masked behind the tight smile that Chakotay gave him.

"Early this morning, Lieutenant Paris?" Chakotay asked.

Tom stepped into the turbolift, and pried a grin onto his face. It felt stiff, and forced. "Don't look for it to happen again anytime soon, Commander," he said. The doors closed, and the floor began to rise. His voice sounded too large and loud for the small confines of the turbolift, as if he had shouted.

Chakotay chuckled. But, unlike Tom's voice, his chuckle seemed small and weak, as if it was drowning in the artificial atmosphere.

Looking at him sideways, Tom watched Chakotay's face for a long moment, trying to catch a glimpse of the thing he had seen earlier. He had learned a long time ago that those who rose high in the ranks were experts at hiding their emotions and feelings. Because of that, Tom had long ago made an art of learning how to see through the cowls and masks that they used to protect themselves.

He blamed his father. A lieutenant commander at the time of his birth, and an admiral by the time Tom was admitted to Starfleet Academy, it seemed to Tom that he had been parented by such a mask. Or so it had seemed to him, as soon as he was old enough to begin to understand such things. He had resented it then, and he resented it now, and so he took great pride in being one of the few who seemed able to pry those cowls and masks away.

It landed him in trouble, as often as not. But there were times—like now—that Tom believed wholeheartedly that the good it did far outweighed the harm it would ever deal him. Because, no matter how good they were at hiding it, every Starfleet officer was a living, breathing being. And Tom believed that, too often, that was a fact forgotten by the members of their crew.

The turbolift doors opened, and Tom followed Chakotay out onto the bridge. He watched the commander take his seat beside the captain's empty chair. For a second, as Tom passed him on his way to the conn., he thought that Chakotay was going to stand again—he stiffened, fingers whitening on the arms of the deep-backed chair, eyes slanted sideways at Captain Janeway's seat—but then he seemed to settle. Something went out of him, all in a rush, and in the last glimpse Tom had of him, it seemed that the bruises around his eyes darkened to a hollow, hungry black.

Something was very, very wrong. Tom just didn't know what.

Not yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd love to hear from you guys! What are you liking? What are you not? Do you have any idea what's wrong with our dear and beloved Captain? Let me know!


	8. Part VIII: Tua Culpa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update, y'all - I've been on vacation, and haven't had as much time (or energy) to write. I still intend to get a chapter up this weekend, though it may be Sunday before it's up. Many thanks to tumblr users ailtara and absynthe-minded for all of their help, and to all of you for your patience with me. Lastly, I hope you enjoy this newest update, and I'd love to hear from you.
> 
> Chapter warnings: Major character death, as well as graphic depiction of injury/death. (To anyone worried, here is a reminder that this fic is canon-compliant)

Part VIII: Tua Culpa

"Kathryn."

The voice was a clap of lightning through Kathryn's mind. She bolted upright, eyes flying open, and with a long gasp dragged in a lung-full of air. Her skin tingled, her muscles ached, and for a flash of a second, she thought that she could smell ash and smoke.

"Where am I?"

Her question was met with a low, ringing chuckle. Then the voice, echoing and reechoing, said, "You are a stubborn one. I'll give you that."

Kathryn stood. Her feet were planted on empty darkness, and nothing but black as dark as pitch stared back at her, no matter which way she turned. She was, it seemed, back in the Void.

Pursing her lips and planting her hands on her hips, Kathryn stared defiantly up at what she could only image was the ceiling. "I demand to know where I am, and who you are. And what the  _hell_  I'm doing here."

The voice sighed. It rippled around her, tugging at her hair and at her uniform jacket, a breathless wind. "I told you." It sounded weary. "I am Virgil. And as for the rest—that will all be explained in time."

Kathryn shook her head. "That's not good enough. First of all, how do you even know the name Virgil?"

"You told me," the voice said, simply. "And now, I have a question for you."

"You still haven't answered mine," Kathryn snapped.

The voice ignored her. "Why did you save the child?"

Kathryn, mouth open to snap a fresh retort, stopped very suddenly. She frowned. "Why did I—What?"

Another sigh. "The child," it said, as if trying to explain a concept to a particularly stubborn child. "Why did you try to save the child from the burning building."

It returned to Kathryn as suddenly as she had been woken. She staggered, the weight of the memories that crashed through her mind striking her with physical force. She saw again the burning rafters, the paint dripping from the walls, the stairs crumbling beneath her. The child, crying on the floor in the middle of the inferno.

"Why did I…" Kathryn looked around, but this time her movement was slower, more out of confusion than demand. She felt something warm and wet trickle down her left cheek, and before she could lift a hand to wipe it away, she tasted the salt of tears on her tongue.

And then her heart hardened. "Who  _wouldn't_  save a child?" she demanded.

"You shielded the child with your own body, despite the fact that to do so would likely cost you your life. Why?"

Kathryn whirled. Her hands were clenched in fists at her sides. "Of  _course_  I saved the child," she said. "It—He—" Her words stumbled over themselves, her affront and her ire tangling her voice and her thoughts. "He was a  _child_ ," she said at last. "How could you even question the choice to try to save him?"

"I see." The voice sounded noncommittal, as neutral as neutron.

Kathryn tasted fury. "Would you?" she asked, taking a senseless step forward.

"Would I what?"

"Would you have tried to save him?"

"My actions are not the ones under trial."

Kathryn frowned. Her nails bit into the palms of her hands. "And what does that mean?" she demanded.

"Enough," the voice said. "I have heard enough. It is time to move on."

"Wait," Kathryn said—only for her voice to vanish as the world emptied out from under her feet. She fell. Air rushed past her, a dizzying hurricane, an unending wave of shadow falling with her.

And then, with a sound like shattering glass, she stopped.

When she opened her eyes—eyes she had not realized were closed—she found herself standing on a rocky plateau. Mountain peaks towered above her, craggy and capped with snow, and down the slope, she could just see the dark shadow of a coniferous forest murmuring in the breeze. The wind was sharp and cold, cutting through the jacket of Kathryn's uniform, and she hunched her shoulders forward and tucked her arms around her chest.

She turned away from the slope, toward the peak of the mountain upon which she stood—and she stopped dead, feet freezing to the broken ground. There, lying before her in smoking ruin, lay a battlefield.

Corpses in black and red and yellow and blue lay scattered amid the rocks, splashes of color against a desolate wasteland. Their bodies were burned and broken, twisted and mangled into crooked shapes. Blood and ash stained the fingers of stone that jutted up towards the heavens. The scent of singed flesh and fresh blood struck Kathryn's nose—and she wondered how it was she had not smelled it before.

There was no sign of the foe that had been fought: no corpses, no dropped weapons, no unusually colored blood. Only black and red and yellow and blue, and the red and green and blue of the peoples under Kathryn's command.

Kathryn took an unnoticed step forward, then another. She felt numb, empty. The smoke drifting over the battlefield touched her, parted around her—and still Kathryn moved forward as if in a daze. She had to see, even if she did not want to see.

Ballard. Chess. Jacobson. Ashmore. Jonas. McKenzie. Sarion. Cabot. Arkinson. Ayala.

One after another, she came across the members of her crew. Their faces were tight with death, their eyes open and staring into a black eternity. Their uniforms were burned, torn, bloodied, dead a hundred different ways.

Flies had begun to gather. Their buzz was a low counterpoint to the keening of the breeze as it blew eddies in the smoke. They crawled across the corpses, their wings iridescent against browning blood, their bodies black against the paleness of skin in death, against the glassiness of dead eyes.

"What happened here?" Kathryn's voice was the tolling of a funeral bell over the silence of the land. Somewhere overhead, a carrion bird screamed in reply.

There was, however, no answer to her query.

Kathryn crested a ridge, and found herself looking down into a small ravine. It looked to have been hollowed out of a once-great rock, now split and weathered long away by wind and rain and ice. Now it held a fine, gritty dirt that grew a smattering of purple and yellow wildflowers.

The wildflowers were not, however, what had captured Kathryn's attention. Rather, it was the three corpses lying, broken and sprawling amidst the purple and yellow, their uniforms covered with the fine dirt, turning black to grey and muting the red and yellow.

"No." The word was a gasp from Kathryn's lips, and as she started down the steep side of the ravine, her legs went weak. She half-slid, half-stumbled down to the ravine floor, a cloud of dust rising in her wake, the grit loose and treacherous under the soles of her boots.

And then she was down, and the bodies of Harry, Tom, and B'Elanna lay stretched out before her.

"No." The word came again, unbidden and unknown, and Kathryn sank to the ground, staring at the dead young men and woman. Her eyes were dry—painfully so—and her throat was dryer. Breathing was suddenly difficult; her lungs ached, her mouth was bone, her throat constricted with each attempt at shallow breath. She could feel her heart shuddering against her ribs, could hear her blood roaring in her ears. Everything else was still, silent.

In that moment, there was nothing else in the world but her and Harry and Tom and B'Elanna.

She loved all of her crew. 70,000 lightyears from home, the people under her command had become her reason for waking up in the morning, for putting on her uniform, for stepping onto the bridge and sitting down in her chair. They were more than the people she was responsible for; they were her family. They had become her heart as well as her life.

But the truth of the matter was that there were three members of her crew in particular that Kathryn loved most—that she loved like she imagined a mother would love a child.

And all three of them lay before her now, cold and lifeless.

There came the sound of grit tumbling down the side of the ravine, then behind that the crunch of footsteps. Understanding came only slowly to Kathryn's grief-numbed mind—but then the sounds clicked, and she was on her feet with a spring and a savage snarl. She whirled, feet kicking up a cloud of dust, and sank into a fighter's crouch. Whoever it was, if they were the ones responsible for the deaths of her crew—of Harry, and Tom, and B'Elanna—then she would kill them without hesitation.

It was not, however, some unknown alien standing before her at the foot of the steep incline. It was a man, tall and tan, with dark hair and dark eyes. Blood from a gaping wound in his neck, which by all rights should have killed him, darkened his skin, stiffened the uniform he wore, painted his face and hands a garish red.

It was a man she knew better than she sometimes thought she knew herself.

"What have you done?" Chakotay's voice was stilted, clipped and curiously formal. The wound in his neck gaped, and fresh rivulets of blood ran bright and red to join the blood already drying in his jacket.

Kathryn stared, confusion and horror warring in her mind and rooting her to the ground. Her mouth opened, and when she spoke, her voice sounded distant to her ears, faint and far away. "Chaktoay?" she heard herself ask. "Chakotay, what happened?" And then, again, fainter and more desperate, "What happened here?"

Chakotay laughed. The sound was rude, and as garish as the blood that bubbled from his mouth, that ran down his chin and from his neck in a growing river. "Don't you know?" he asked. The question was a sneer.

Kathryn shook her head. "No," she said softly. "No, I wasn't here. I found them here like this. Chakotay, please—tell me what's going on."

And again Chakotay laughed, high and loud and sounding not at all like the Chakotay she knew so well. "You know what happened," Chakotay said. His eyes never left hers. "You know what happened, because you're the one that killed them."

Kathryn stumbled as if Chakotay had physically struck her. The ground seemed to open up beneath her, the world tilting on its axis to send her falling, falling, falling into empty blue and emptier black. She couldn't stand, couldn't see, couldn't breathe. All she could do was gasp, and stumble, and shake her head dumbly.

"No," she said. "No, I didn't—I wouldn't."

Chakotay shook his head in return, and when he stepped toward her, neck gaping and mouth pulled wide into a crimson smile, Kathryn stumbled back a step. "Yes," he said. Then again, "Yes. This is your fault, Kathryn."

"No," she gasped again, and stumbled another step back.

"You killed them."

"No."

"This is your fault, Kathryn.  _Yours_."

The heel of Kathryn's right boot caught on something soft and she fell backwards. She landed hard, and when she scrambled to regain her footing, she found that she had tripped over a leg—Harry's leg. She froze, still on the ground, every muscle locking into place and holding her prisoner beside the corpse of the man she would have called son.

And still Chakotay came on, dark and towering, alive with a wound of death still bleeding down his neck. "You killed them," he said. "You killed them. This is your fault, Kathryn."

He was above her. His shoulders blocked out the sun, throwing her into sudden shadow. And then, kneeling, he reached out with one hand to seize her by the neck. His fingers were cold, cold, cold as night and shadow and the vastness of space—as death—and as they tightened around Kathryn's neck, his other hand batting easily away the frail defense she threw against him, she could not help but shiver down to her bones.

Chakotay leaned down, down, down, until the wound in his neck wept scarlet tears onto Kathryn's face. The ground bit into Kathryn's back and into her scalp, and still Chakotay pressed, until her eyes watered and her breath came whistling from her throat. "You killed them," Chakotay whispered, and Kathryn did not fight him. "You killed them."

And then everything went black.

 

~*x*~

 

Kes sat beside the captain's bed in a chair dragged in from the living room, feet beneath her and chin resting in the palm of her right hand. The lights were low, the temperature in the room lower, and Kes watched as starlight streamed past the windows in the bulkheads to either side of the captain's head. She could hear the captain's breath, slow and deep and rhythmic, and could sense the brightness of her mind; her captain was alive, and steadily so.

That did not, however, quell—or even ease—the worry that churned in Kes's belly. And she suspected that it was the same for The Doctor, for all that he did not have a stomach that could churn. An hour after the captain had slipped unconscious, he had left for Sickbay, leaving stern instructions for Kes to monitor their captain's life signs. She had promised she would alert him the second anything changed.

Thus far, everything had been quiet. Chakotay had stopped in on his way to the bridge for his duty shift, and Kes had repeated her promise to notify him if anything changed. He had left shortly after, with little more than a curt nod and one last, long look at the captain, still and silent in her bed.

The sound of the captain's door opening dragged Kes out of her ruminations. She straightened in the chair and turned, to see The Doctor striding into the room. His face was dark, his posture stiff, and when he moved to set the medical case down on the captain's beside table he did so with more force than was strictly necessary.

"I take it the tests did not go well, Doctor?" Kes asked. She swung her feet down to the ground, and sat forward in the chair.

The Doctor straightened, and turned to face her. "No," he said bluntly. "I ran every single test and screening I could think of, and one or two that I invented on the spot, and nothing. Absolutely nothing."

"So you still have no idea what is making the captain sick?"

"Didn't I just say that?" The Doctor snapped, waspish. Then he sighed, and turned back to the case, which opened with a click at his touch. "How has she been?" he asked, his back still turned.

"About the same as when you left," Kes said. "I sensed a change in her breathing pattern about an hour later, but it eased again after about fifteen minutes, just when I was about to call you. She's been calm ever since."

"Hm," The Doctor grunted. "I wish you  _had_  called me," he said. "If it happens again, please do."

"I will, Doctor," Kes said.

The Doctor nodded, and then set about drawing another vial of blood into a containment vial.

Kes watched him work for a long moment. Then, tentatively, she spoke. "Doctor?"

"Hm?"

"I've been thinking." Kes took a breath, and flattened her palms against her skirt. It was a habit she had picked up since joining the  _Voyager_  crew, and had become a reflex whenever she was not entirely certain about how what she was about to say would be received.

"A dangerous pastime for anyone," The Doctor commented, off-handedly and without any real bite.

"Yes, well, I've been thinking: Could this illness have anything to do with the Kaminoans?"

The Doctor paused in his work, and turned to give his full attention to Kes. "Why do you think the Kaminoans might have something to do with this?"

"They had her for nearly twelve hours," Kes said, softly. "We have no idea what they did to her in that time."

The Doctor frowned. "True," he said. "But nothing inimical showed up on our scans. She was in perfect health when we got her back."

"According to all of your tests  _now_  she's in perfect health," Kes pointed out.

"Hardly," The Doctor retorted. "I said that the cause of her sickness is yet to be found, not that she was healthy."

"You get my point, though, do you not, Doctor?"

The Doctor sighed. "Yes, Kes," he said. "I get your point. And you do have a point. But I'm not ready just yet to blame the Kaminoans." He fixed Kes with a steady, penetrating look. "You know what the commander will do as soon as we start leveling accusations. And Mr. Tuvok too."

Kes smiled, a half smile. "Yes," she said. "They are both protective of her."

The Doctor snorted. "Protective?  _Over_ -protective is what I would call it."

"So we keep this between us," Kes said, bringing the subject back to the topic on hand. "At least for now. But I do think, Doctor, that it is a possibility that we should not reject so soon."

The Doctor's eyes darkened. "You're right, Kes," he said. "We don't know what they did—or what they were trying to do. And twelve hours is a long time for any operation. I was surprised that they hadn't accomplished what they set out to do…" He trailed off, as if losing his words to his thoughts.

Kes sat forward. "Yes. So what if they  _did_  accomplish what they set out to do?" she asked. "What if we were wrong?"

"I am afraid," The Doctor said after a long moment, in which Kes's words hung heavy between them, hovered over their captain's still body like a thunderous cloud, "that you may be right."


	9. Part IX: Exspectare

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look who's actually on time this week! Also, I don't mind saying that the next chapter is about halfway written - and I could probably be persuaded to upload the it before next Saturday. Aaaanyway, I hope you enjoy.

Part IX: Exspectare

Tom Paris hovered awkwardly by the turbolift doors. His hands fluttered anxiously at his sides; first they were clenched tightly into fists, then they smoothed invisible wrinkles from his uniform pants. The air was too hot, then too cold, and he bounced on his toes as soon as he slowed from his restless pacing.

The turbolift doors opened, and divulged an ensign and two crewmen. They paused, drawn aback by the sudden sight of the ship's pilot standing almost in their faces, then stuttered quick apologies.

Tom lifted a hand, and grinned at them. "Bad timing," he said, and moved aside so that they could carry on down the corridor without having to walk through him.

"Excuse us," the ensign—a red-headed, freckled young man—said, and his two companions echoed the sentiment softly as they scurried past Tom.

Tom watched them turn the corner, and then went back to his anxious pacing.

Two minutes later the turbolift doors opened again, and Commander Chakotay stepped off of the 'lift.

"Commander," Tom said, forcefully bright. "What a coincidence. I don't suppose you're headed to the commissary?"

Chakotay, looking tired and drawn, little more than glanced at Tom. "I am," he said. He sounded as tired as he looked.

"Mind if I join you?" Tom asked, after an awkward second elapsed in which they simply stood and looked at each other.

Chakotay glanced at the padds in his right hand, then back up at Tom. He sighed. "No, not at all," he said.

They walked down the corridor together, the silence held between them by an uncomfortable uncertainty. It lasted until they had both gotten plates of food—what looked like steak but with a purple undertone, leola rolls, and greens of an oblong shape—and had settled down at one of the small tables toward the back of the room, well away from the doors and all but the most prying of eyes.

"I take it there is a reason you wanted to come with me?" Chakotay asked at last. He sat with fork in one hand, a padd in the other, and he looked at Tom with the kind of expression normally reserved for particularly tiresome children.

"What, you mean your dazzling wit and charm isn't enough of a reason for me to want to sit with you?" Tom asked. He tried to smile.

Chakotay just looked at him. Though he had seen it in the hall, Tom was struck again by just how tired and drawn Chakotay looked; his eyes were bruised with exhaustion, and his cheeks seemed almost gaunt.

Tom's smile died. He picked up his own fork, and stabbed it at the almost-steak. "No," he said into the silence, "I suppose it's not a good enough reason."

"Tom, please," Chakotay said, still not taking a bite. "If there's something you want to say to me, say it. Otherwise please leave me alone so that I can get some work done."

"Where's the captain?" It came out all in a rush, and not at all the way Tom had rehearsed saying it in his head the thousand and one times while waiting for Chakotay to appear on the turbolift. "I mean," he stumbled, trying to recover, "she wasn't on the bridge today. And she wasn't on the bridge yesterday afternoon either. And you said last night that she was sick. Is it something to do with that? Is that why you look like death only badly warmed?"

Chakotay stared at Tom. Then he shook his head, as if dazed. "Look, Tom," he began, and Tom had the distinct impression that Chakotay did not yet know what it was that he meant to say. He hesitated—but then, before Tom could figure out what to say, he spoke again, and with more calm than Tom would have expected. "What I told you last night—it was out of line. The captain is just fine. She's just been distracted with a project. Yes, she has a cold, but like I said last night, it's nothing to worry about."

Tom stared at Chakotay for a long moment. Chakotay stared back.

Finally, Tom nodded. "Okay," he said. "But you still haven't told me why you look like death badly warmed over."

Chakotay's look slid resolutely into a glare. "And you don't need to know all the details of my personal life," he all but snapped. "Now, if you will excuse me, lieutenant. I have work to do."

Tom stood, startled into action more than obeying Chakotay's wish. He could count on one hand the number of times he had heard Chakotay snap, and when it happened was always in a high-tension situation, or after Chakotay had been purposefully pressed past his breaking point.

"Sorry, Commander," Tom said stiffly, gathering his plate and cutlery. "I didn't realize my concern was so imposing to you." Then, before Chakotay could speak, Tom turned and marched away from the table.

Chakotay hadn't told him anything of use. Tom was pretty sure that he had been lying about the project, and he had flat out refused to answer Tom's other question. Which left Tom with a few very vague impressions of what was going on—and none of them were good.

~*x*~

Tom was gone, and Chakotay finally had the peace and quiet he had been craving all day. As he lifted a forkful of greens to his mouth, however, he realized with a sudden sour jolt in his stomach that his appetite had disappeared.

The day had been agonizingly long. He had remained on the bridge for his entire shift, refusing to allow himself to retire to his office where he knew he would do nothing but stew and, eventually, give in to the desire to make his way down to Kathryn's quarters. Instead he had read reports from his command chair, and written a few of his own on a padd at hand, and had tried to ignore the emptiness of the captain's chair just across the control console.

It had been a terrible eight hours.

After his shift had ended, Chakotay had forced himself to drop his reports off in his office, and gather another handful of padds that needed attention, before making his way down to see Kathryn. Kes met him at her door, and ushered him in with a warning to be quiet.

Kathryn was asleep in her bed, her face flushed with fever. Kes murmured a quiet supplication, and when Chakotay had nodded, she vanished from the room. Chakotay was grateful; he suspected that Kes knew exactly what he wanted, and that her request for him to watch the captain while she returned to her quarters for a book was little more than an excuse to allow him to sit by Kathryn's side.

He watched her face, watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest. She was as calm and tranquil as he had ever seen. It was as jarring as it was somehow uplifting, as if by seeing her sleep so peacefully Chakotay was again reminded that Kathryn Janeway was as human as him. It was at once reassuring and discomfiting.

When Kes returned, she did so with The Doctor in tow. Grudgingly, Chakotay ceded his seat to Kes, and then followed The Doctor out into Kathryn's living room. The couch beneath the viewport looked rumpled and forgotten, and it felt as if the days it had been since Chakotay last sat there with Kathryn were instead weeks, if not months.

"What do you have, Doctor?" Chakotay asked, turning away from the couch and his memories.

"Not much, I'm afraid," The Doctor said. "At this point, I mostly just know what it  _isn't_."

"And what is it not?" Chakotay asked.

"Nothing that we know of," The Doctor said simply.

"Hell," Chakotay said softly. "Do you have any ideas?"

The Doctor shook his head. "Unfortunately no. Not yet. But I haven't given up hope."

Chakotay's eyes hardened on The Doctor's. "Good," he said. It was as much a warning as it was an affirmation.

"Don't worry, Commander," The Doctor said. "I won't rest until I know what this is—and how to fight it. We want her back, healthy and hale, just as much as you do."

Chakotay nodded. "Good," he said again, though this time without the hard edge of warning. "And Doctor?"

The Doctor looked questioningly at Chakotay, silently urging him to continue.

"Let's continue to keep this illness of the captain's between us, yes? As it seems to not be contagious, there's no use in causing a panic among the rest of the crew."

"They are going to begin questioning where their captain is before too long," The Doctor pointed out.

"I know," Chakotay said. "But let me handle the crew. You focus on finding a cure for the captain."

The Doctor hesitated. Then, warily, he said, "I must say, Commander, we do not yet know for sure if this illness  _is_  contagious. And as such, I'm not sure of the wisdom of you having continuing contact with her."

"If I was going to be infected I would have been infected already, wouldn't I?" Chakotay asked. His voice was again suddenly, painfully sharp.

"We don't know what the incubation period for this illness is," The Doctor pointed out. "For all we know, she might not have been contagious yet as of last night. We also don't know how it's transmitted—if it's transmitted at all. There's a chance that you may not have come into contact with whatever means of transmittance this illness uses.

"I'm sorry, Commander," The Doctor said softly. There was a distinct note of compassion in his voice. "But until we know more, I think it best that you allow Kes and I to watch her alone."

Chakotay stared. But then, slowly, he nodded. "You're right, Doctor," he said. The words were bitter on his tongue. "But keep me updated," he ordered. "And if anything changes—if you need anything—my prior order still stands. Get me."

"Yes sir," The Doctor said. "Now I think it best that you go. The less contact you have with the captain, the better."

And so Chakotay had left.

Chakotay dropped his uneaten forkful of greens back onto his plate. His stomach was churning, and the sharp taste of bile sat at the back of his throat. The Doctor's parting warning still rang hollowly in his ears, now layered over with Tom's parting salvo.

Was he doing the right thing? Chakotay wondered. Was keeping the crew in the dark about the captain's illness the right thing to do? More than just Tom were going to begin asking questions soon—had likely already started talking amongst themselves, speculating and wondering where she had been for the last day and a half. The crew was still in the thick throes of repairs, and it was unusual for the captain to not be seen down in Engineering at least once during her duty shift—and usually after her duty shift as well—when the ship was in such a state of fragile repair. Even more than that, the bridge crew was well-known to gossip, and news that she hadn't been on the bridge at all since the afternoon before was going to make it through the ship almost faster than Chakotay could cough.

Chakotay stood and, gathering his uneaten food and padds in hand, retreated from the mess hall. Neelix gave him a worried look when he took the plate full of food from him, but to Chakotay's relief did not question him—only gave him a nod, and a forcefully cheerful "Good night, Commander," which Chakotay half-heartedly repeated.

He would give it another day, he decided as he made his way toward his own quarters and what promised to be a restless night of fretful sleep. If The Doctor had no new news by tomorrow evening after the end of alpha shift, he would go talk to Tuvok and tell him what was happening. Together, Chakotay was certain, they could come up with what, and how, to tell the crew.

Chakotay hoped it would not come to that. He had the sinking feeling, however, that it would.

~*x*~

Katrhyn opened her eyes to the Void.

It was as black and formless as ever, still and silent. It was not, however, empty. As she sat up, then dragged her aching body into a stand, it seemed to her as if she felt breath against the back of her neck. She whirled, body and senses tensing, fingers curling into fists ready to fly.

Standing there, no more than three feet away, was the figure of her first officer, a gaping wound in his neck.

"This," said Virgil's voice, empty and echoing from every corner of air, "should not have happened."

Kathryn, wary and uncertain, watched Chakotay—or the man who would be Chakotay. He was unnaturally still; his chest did not move with breath, his eyes did not flicker with sight, and the blood did not drip from the wound carved into his neck. He was as unmoving as a mannequin, as if he had been frozen in an instant.

"What do you mean?" Kathryn asked, still not taking her eyes off of Chakotay. Her throat still ached with the memory of his hands tightening "What should not have happened?"

" _This_." Virgil said, and a wind blew suddenly through the Void, whining and hungry. It swirled around Chakotay, standing still as death, though it did not seem to touch him.

Kathryn, confused, hurting, and beginning to grow angry again, frowned. "Then what should have happened?" she snapped.

"This is what happens when you do not have a Guide."

Kathryn's frown deepened. "And what is that supposed to mean?" she demanded.

"Enough!" Virgil's voice cracked through the Void with the alacrity of a lightning bolt.

In spite of herself, Kathryn ducked and lifted a forearm to shield her face, expecting a blow of wind, if nothing else. When the blow did not come, she straightened slowly, looking around cautiously with narrowed eyes. Something had changed…

It took her a frightful second to realize what had changed. Chakotay was no longer standing in front of her. He had vanished, as quickly and cleanly as one dematerialized. There was no trace of him—no lingering scent, or warmth, or after-image that was sometimes left for a heartbeat after transport. He was simply gone.

"You have no Guide," Virgil said, "save me. And you are more than was expected."

Again Kathryn opened her mouth to demand an explanation. But then she bit her tongue and held her silence, hoping that by maintaining her silence Virgil—whoever he, or they, may be—would continue speaking and would divulge more information than if he was distracted by silencing her.

"There is no choice, though," Virgil went on. "The trials must be completed, Guide or no. There is no other recourse."

"What are these trials of which you speak?" Kathryn asked.

But Virgil did not answer. Instead, Kathryn felt again the sucking emptiness of the world vanishing beneath her feet, and then the swooping sensation of falling.


	10. Part X: Curare

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow look at me getting this out early! Some people begged, and I relented. (They didn't have to beg all that hard.) I hope you enjoy!

Part X: Curare

Two hours after finally falling asleep, Chakotay jerked awake to the incessant beep of his combadge. He rolled over groggily, slapped his hand down on the badge, and mumbled a bleary, "Chakotay here."

"Commander." It was The Doctor. "We need you."

Chakotay was out of his bed and halfway to the door, throwing a loose shirt on over his sweatpants, almost before The Doctor's voice had died away. Pinning his combadge to his shirt, Chakotay all but ran for his door, colliding with a table's edge on the way.

Kes opened Kathryn's door at the first chime. Her face was pale, her eyes wide and dark, and if he had not already heard it in The Doctor's voice, Chakotay would have known then that something was horribly, dreadfully wrong.

"She's in here, Commander," Kes said, then turned and led him through Kathryn's living room, her bedroom, and into the bathroom.

Kathryn was screaming. She was laid out on the floor, stripped down to bra and underwear, and as another weak, barely audible scream escaped her cracked and bleeding lips, Chakotay watched in horror as she arched up and back, smashing her head into the floor and contorting her spine into an awful, cracking curve. Her eyes were open and glassy, unseeing, her legs spasming beneath her. Her right hand grasped empty air; the Doctor held her left.

"Commander," The Doctor said with a gasp of relief, looking up to see Chakotay and Kes standing in the doorway. "Thank you for coming."

"What do you need?" Chakotay asked, brushing past Kes to kneel by Kathryn's side. She screamed again, and Chakotay moved just in time to prevent her from cracking her head against the edge of the sink cabinet as she thrashed.

"Her fever spiked," The Doctor explained. His voice was terse, edged with barely restrained fear. "We need to get her into the tub—but I'm afraid she's going to hurt herself."

"What do you need?" Chakotay asked again.

The Doctor looked at him, then looked at Kes, then down at Kathryn who had at last relaxed into a slump. She was panting heavily, and though her eyes were still open, Chakotay could tell that she was not seeing the ceiling above them.

"Get into the tub," The Doctor ordered. "Kes and I will lift her in. We're going to need you to hold her—though not too tight. I don't want her hurting herself because you're holding her too tightly when she goes into another seizure."

Chakotay nodded. "Okay," he said. "I can do that."

He stood and crossed to the tub. It was filled a little less than halfway with water barely cooler than room temperature. He stepped over the low tub wall, then sat down slowly with his back against the front ledge. The water soaked his pants and the lower half of his shirt almost instantly, sticking the cloth to his skin and splashing onto his arms and chest.

"Ready?" he heard The Doctor say. "I want to get this done before she has another one."

"Yes," came Kes's calm reply.

Then the two appeared in Chakotay's line of sight. Kes held Kathryn's legs, while The Doctor supported her head and shoulders. The moved carefully, deliberately, but with an air of barely-restrained haste. Chakotay did not want to think about what might happen if Kathryn had another fit while they were in the middle of carrying her.

Chakotay opened his arms, and as The Doctor and Kes moved to lower her over the edge and into the tub, he placed his left hand in the small of her back, helping to guide her down. For half a moment it was an awkward tangle of arms and hands and Chakotay's legs, Kathryn's limp body the center point of a flurry of uncoordinated movement—and then she was down, sliding into the temperate water and into Chakotay's arms.

She screamed.

Chakotay's arms tightened instinctively around her as Kathryn thrashed, too hot skin coming into sudden contact with the lukewarm water. She fought his hold, fought the water, and above it all she screamed again, a high, keening pitch that made Chakotay's teeth ache and his ears ring.

And then The Doctor's voice, rising high above hers, shouting in his ear. "Loosen your hold, Commander. Loosen your—"

Chakotay loosened his grip. Kathryn thrashed, clawed at Chakotay's arms and the sides of the tub—and then, abruptly, she went completely still.

"Kathryn?" Her name came unbidden to Chakotay's lips. She trembled in his arms, her entire body shuddering as wave after wave of tremors wracked her bones. Her back was propped up against his chest, and as he slid down a little deeper into the water, he felt her hands close over his clasped across her stomach.

A hand fell on Chakotay's shoulder. "Very good, Commander," came The Doctor's, as if through cotton. Chakotay looked up, barely seeing, barely hearing—the only thing that seemed to exist in the same reality as him was Kathryn, lying trembling and gasping in his arms. "Keep her like that for a few minutes."

She whimpered. He could feel it in his arms, in his chest. Her breath came in little gasps that sounded painfully like choked sobs.

"Doctor," Chakotay said, blinking and focusing on The Doctor's face, lined with worry. "Are you sure this is necessary?"

"I've never in my existence seen a fever spike as rapidly as hers just did," The Doctor said. "If we had tried any subtler ways of slowing its progress, I am afraid we might have lost her. Which is to say: yes, Commander, this is necessary. It will only be for a few minutes, though."

Chakotay nodded. He turned back to Kathryn, cradled between his legs, between his arms. "It's going to be okay," he murmured, lost again already in the world that existed only between him and Kathryn. "This is going to be over soon."

She whimpered in reply, and Chakotay wondered if she could understand him.

"Just hold on, Kathryn," Chakotay whispered, bending his head down so that he was speaking against her ear. Her hair stuck to his cheek. "This is going to be over soon. Just hold on."

 

~*x*~

 

Tom dropped his bowl of oatmeal down on the table and flopped into a chair. "Good morning," he said cheerfully.

B'Elanna, seated on the other side of the table, glared at him. "Take it down about seven notches," she said, voice only a little kinder than a growl.

"Oh, but B'Elanna," Tom chirped, "isn't it just a wonderful morning?"

"Maybe eight," was B'Elanna's retort.

Tom turned to Harry, sitting beside him. "And what about you?" he asked. "Are you Grumpy Pants this morning too?"

"No," Harry said blithely. "But then again I wasn't up until 0430 working on the warp core either."

Tom grimaced, looking back at B'Elanna. "0430?" he repeated.

"Yep."

"Ouch."

"Yep."

"How's it coming?" Tom asked.

"Worse than expected," B'Elanna said unhappily. "It's probably gonna be at least another three days before we can do any better than impulse."

"That bad, huh?"

Harry elbowed Tom in the side. "If you'd been down here on time, you would have already heard B'Elanna wax long and not-poetic about it."

B'Elanna mimed throwing a spoon of oatmeal at Harry's head. "I'm plenty poetic."

"Not when you're running on an hour and a half of sleep," Harry replied.

"I have to agree with Harry on that," Tom said.

"Fine, Mr. Bright Shoes," B'Elanna grumbled.

Tom sobered. "But really, repairs are going that badly?"

B'Elanna nodded. "When it's this bad, the captain is usually down in Engineering helping out. She hasn't been down since the first evening, though."

Tom shared a glance with Harry. Harry looked back at him with half a frown—which deepened when he saw the darkness in Tom's expression.

"What is it?" he asked.

Tom hesitated only for a second. Leaning in, he said quietly, "I think something's really wrong with Captain Janeway."

B'Elanna looked from Tom to Harry, then back to Tom. "Why do you think that?" she asked. "I mean, it's odd that she hasn't been around, but that doesn't mean something's wrong."

"I talked to Chakotay last night," Tom said. "He was exhausted. And he all but bit my head off when I asked if he was okay."

"We're all exhausted," B'Elanna pointed out. "And no offense, Tom, but you're not exactly someone who commonly asks after Chakotay's wellbeing. He probably thought you were up to something."

Tom glanced at Harry again, who looked somber. "True," he said, turning back to B'Elanna, "but Harry and I found out the other night that the captain's sick."

"Okay," she said slowly. "That still doesn't mean something's really wrong. We would hear if she was in any danger, wouldn't we?"

"Would we, though?" Tom asked. "She wasn't on the bridge at all yesterday."

"She wasn't," Harry agreed. "Which I thought was odd, but the commander didn't say anything, and neither did Tuvok."

"Maybe she just doesn't want to get anyone else sick," B'Elanna said. "Seriously, you two are acting like there's some conspiracy going on."

"We didn't say conspiracy." Tom looked at Harry, and Harry shook his head. "We're just saying that something is wrong. I mean, have you ever known the captain to not be down in Engineering when  _Voyager_ 's in as bad of shape as she is right now?"

"No," B'Elanna admitted. "But still—"

"It's just weird," Tom said, cutting in. "You have to agree with that much, at least."

"It is weird," B'Elanna conceded. "I still don't know that it's as much of a big deal as you're making it out to be."

Tom rolled his eyes and sat back in his chair. "Who would have ever thought you'd be the voice of reason?"

"When it comes to you two, plenty often," B'Elanna shot back.

"Let's see if she's on the bridge today," Harry said, dragging the conversation back to topic before it could spiral in yet another friendly argument. "If she's not, Tom or I will say something to Chakotay or to Tuvok. Surely we're not the only ones who'll have noticed, and who will have questions."

"And if she is?" B'Elanna asked.

Tom shrugged. "Then you were right, and she probably just didn't want to get anyone else sick."

B'Elanna nodded, satisfied, and took a final bite of oatmeal. "Well," she said, dropping her spoon into the empty bowl, "let me know what happens."

"We will," Harry said.

"Okay. Well then, I'll see you two at dinner," B'Elanna said, and stood.

Harry and Tom watched her walk away, then turned to each other.

"You really think something is wrong?" Harry asked Tom softly.

"I do," Tom said. "You didn't see Chakotay last night."

Harry shook his head, sitting back. "But why would they keep something like that from us? Don't we have a right to know if something is wrong? She's our captain."

"I know," Tom agreed. "But you know how Chakotay and Tuvok are."

Harry snorted. "Sure. But still."

"Which is why," Tom said, finally digging into his own oatmeal, "if she's still not on the bridge today, we'll ask them about it. And we'll do it in front of everyone, so that they can't just sidestep the question."

"Okay. But you'd better hurry up and finish eating," Harry said, "or we'll be late for duty. And I doubt that'll be a very good start, if we're going to try to question either of them."

Tom took two more heaping bites, then nodded. "Okay," he said, standing quickly. "Let's go."


	11. Part XI: Malus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so, so sorry for the long gap in updates. I had a horrid case of writer's block, plus a bunch of life stuff happening all at once. I'll try my hardest to get another update out on Saturday, thus getting back on track - but no promises, other than that I'll try really, really hard.

Part XI: Malus

Tom and Harry made it to the bridge just in time for the start of shift. The turbolift doors opened onto an unusual hush, tense and uncertain and wary. They exchanged a sidelong glance, and then made their slow way out onto the bridge and toward their posts.

The captain's chair was, once again, conspicuously empty.

"Maybe she's running late," Harry muttered in Tom's ear, before veering away toward ops.

Somehow, Tom thought as he settled into his seat at the conn., he didn't think that was why the captain wasn't on the bridge. The only thing more constant than his perpetual tardiness—or so he had been told by both Harry and Tuvok, though not in so many words in the latter's case—was Captain Kathryn Janeway's early report to the bridge.

He settled into his chair at the conn. with his heart beating in his mouth, and anxiety that felt suspiciously like the first taste of fear gnawing at his ribs.

The morning crawled by with aching slowness. There was little for Tom to do but keep  _Voyager_  steady where she hung, trapped in the asteroid belt's slow orbit. The far distant stars shone pale and taunting. By midmorning, Tom was intimately familiar with the trailing gleam of ice on the surface of an asteroid tumbling a mere ten kilometers from  _Voyager_ 's shields.

And still, Captain Janeway did not appear on the bridge.

Lunch came and went. Tom and Harry ate together in tense silence, sharing only a few uncomfortable sentences. They knew what was coming—what they were going to do—and it sat uneasy between them, and between each bite of green-breaded sandwich. The meat tasted thick and heavy on Tom's tongue, the lettuce-like vegetable like dust, and he found he had difficulty swallowing, even with large mouthfuls of fruit juice. It looked like Harry was having a similar problem.

Neelix approached as they were finishing, with a cheerful smile and a warm, "Good afternoon, gentlemen!"

"Hi, Neelix," Harry said. He sounded miserable.

Neelix's face fell into a concerned frown. "What seems to be the matter?" he asked, pulling out a chair at their table and inviting himself to sit.

Tom pulled a face, and Harry shrugged apologetically, then nodded in Neelix's direction. With a sigh, Tom looked at the Talaxian, and, with sudden inspiration, asked, "Neelix, have you seen the captain the last couple of days?" It occurred to him that they should have asked Neelix first thing; if something was wrong with the captain, then it was likely that Neelix, as both Morale Officer and Chef, would have heard about it.

Neelix's brow furrowed, and he looked between the two humans in thoughtful silence. Then, "No, I haven't. Which seems odd, now that I think about it. She'll usually stop by in the mornings for a cup of coffee, even when I don't see her in here for meals for a few days." Neelix leaned forward, folding his hands on top of the table.

"Have you noticed anything else odd?" Harry asked.

"I'm not sure what you mean," Neelix said. He was silent for a few more seconds, before saying, "The crew has been a bit on edge. But I figured that was because of what happened with the Kaminoans, and then being stranded by that solar storm. Why do you ask?"

"Because the captain hasn't been on the bridge for two days now," Tom said, blunt as a knife.

"You think something is wrong?" Neelix asked.

"We don't know," Harry said.

"We're going to ask Chakotay this afternoon," Tom added.

Neelix nodded and sat back. "Well tell me what he says, would you?"

"Of course we will," Harry promised.

"Now you two had better get going," Neelix said, standing, "or you'll be late."

Tom rolled his eyes. "Seems like I'm always hearing that," he muttered. Harry laughed.

When they returned to the bridge, it was to find Chakotay already there, sitting in his chair and studying something on the command console.

"Do you think he even left?" Harry asked Tom quietly.

Tom shrugged. "I dunno. He didn't come to the mess hall when we were there."

Harry nodded. "Well," he said, giving Tom one last long, heavy look, "good luck."

"Thanks," Tom said with a grin.

Tom dragged his feet as he made his way toward the conn. Halfway there, with hands clasped in front of him and breath shuddering against his ribs, he spun on his heels to look at Chakotay, sitting quiet and engrossed in whatever he was reading. He did not look up, even when Tom took a step toward him.

"Commander?" Tom said. "I'd like to talk to you."

Chakotay looked up at last. "I'll be in my office after alpha shift."

"I'm afraid it can't wait," Tom said.

Chakotay frowned. "Very well," he said, and made to stand.

"Actually, sir," Tom said, taking another step forward, "I wanted to talk to you now. Here."

Chakotay's frown deepened into a thunderous warning. "Yes, Lieutenant?"

Tom took a deep breath and, holding his hands very tightly together, said as stoutly as he could, "It's about the Captain."

Something in Chakotay's eyes shifted, then bled black. "What about her?" he asked. If his voice had been thunder before, it was lightning now.

"We wanted to know where she is," Tom said, questioning every single choice that had led him to this encounter. "She hasn't been on the bridge in two days now, and that's—well, odd."

"Where she commands from is the captain's prerogative," Chakotay said. His voice was ice and death.

"Of course, sir," Tom said hurriedly, the edges of his words tripping on one another. "But all the same, sir, we're just…worried," he finished lamely.

From the corner of his vision, which had narrowed to contain only Chakotay and the empty chair beside him, Tom saw the commander's hands tighten on the arms of his chair. His knuckles faded to white, while the black in his eyes hardened to stone. "I see," Chakotay said. "And who," he asked, his voice as soft as water, "is this 'we' you speak of."

"Me, and Harry, and B'Elanna, and Neelix," Tom admitted. "And everyone else who's noticed that the captain hasn't been on the bridge lately."

Chakotay's knuckles were as bloodless as bone. "I see," he said again. His fingers uncurled slowly, stiffly, as if he was having to think about each and every movement of the muscles straightening them.

"Sir?" Tom asked. A dark and niggling concern wormed at the back of his throat, but he did not have the time or courage to seek it out—not here, not now.

"The captain has a cold," Chakotay said. His words were clipped, and oddly strained. "It's unpleasant, if not dangerous, and she wanted to spare anyone else from catching it. That's it."

Tom swallowed the bitter taste of disbelief. "I see, sir," it was his turn to say.

"Now if you will take your post,  _Lieutenant_ ," Chakotay said, inclining his head and stressing Tom's rank.

"Yes, sir," Tom said. He turned toward the conn. and, with heavy footsteps, made his way toward his post.

A message was waiting for him in the corner of his display panel when he sat. It was from Harry.

 _Well that went well,_  the message said.

 _Did you believe him?_  Tom typed quickly, with a furtive glance behind him to make sure that Chakotay had already returned to his reading.

 _I mean, it would make sense,_  was Harry's quick reply.

_Sure. It makes sense. But did you believe him?_

A long moment passed before the message icon appeared again in the corner of Tom's display.  _No,_  was Harry's simple answer.

_Me either. But now what?_

Another long pause. Then,  _Let's talk about this after shift. I don't want Tuvok to catch us passing notes again._

Tom stifled a snort, but typed a quick message before turning his attention back to the asteroid still spinning resolutely beyond the viewscreen, and to his troubled thoughts. It was going to be a long afternoon—and he had a feeling a long evening after.

Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. Chakotay wasn't telling them the truth, and something was wrong with the captain. They just had to figure out what.

~*x*~

Chakotay's quarters were quiet and dark. He had just come from Kathryn's room, where he had been met by The Doctor's stern hand and sterner frown. He had only been permitted to stand in the doorway for a handful of minutes, watching The Doctor hover at Kathryn's side like the moth again at the candle flame, before he had been shunted out into the hall with the same warning that had banned him from her room the day before.

Now he sat on his couch, a glass of replicated brandy in one hand, the bottle on the table at his elbow. He was halfway to drunk, and his thoughts were finally beginning to slow enough that he was able to force them into tipsy lines.

His confrontation with Tom on the bridge after the lunch break had been a shock, though in retrospect he realized he should have expected it sooner or later. Of course the crew noticed her absence. And of course they asked about her.

Was he wrong for having lied?

 _I didn't lie,_  the logical half of his thoughts said sternly.  _You just mitigated the truth._

"They're going to find out sooner or later," he told the empty air.

The empty air answered back with silence.

Chakotay sighed and sank back into the couch's back. The brandy burned his throat as he took a slow sip, and his eyes watered. He had never been a fan of brandy, but it was strong—and tonight he wanted something that reminded him where and who he was with every drink.

Why  _was_  he hiding the truth from the crew? Was it for their own protection? For Kathryn's? Or was it for his? Was it noble consideration of her status as captain? Or was it more selfish? Was it that he wanted her fragility to be a secret that only he—and The Doctor, and Kes—saw and understood? Did he want her pain, witnessed and borne, to be an unspoken bond between the two of them?

His forehead found the palm of his empty hand. "Why am I like this?" he asked again of the empty air.

The silence echoed back at him, loud and mocking.

He couldn't keep the secret of her illness forever, and the longer he tried, the more painful the telling would be. But when he thought of coming forward—of telling the crew, of telling Tuvok—a sour resentment rose from his throat and choked himt.

So he would keep the secret for a little longer, he decided—for as long as he could. What other choice did he have, for her—for him?

The brandy scorched his throat as he swallowed the last finger's worth, and he poured another too-generous helping. It splashed up the sides, amber and thin and sharp, and Chakotay wondered if it was a metaphor for his life. Then he wondered if he was drunker than he had thought.

Without a grimace, he tilted his head and drained the glass.

~*x*~

Kathryn opened her eyes to darkness and pain. She opened her mouth, to speak or cry or scream, and the darkness crawled in. She choked—and felt the darkness coil around her, loving and warm and empty, empty, empty.

It reminded her of hands, and of eyes peering out from corners, and of saccharine voices that whispered poison and promise.

 _Run,_  a quiet voice whispered, between her eyes and thoughts and ribs.

And she tried but the darkness coiled tighter, the warmth leeching past her skin and down into her bones. She opened her mouth again to scream—only to hear a voice, soft and sweet and saccharine, whisper,  _Easy, Captain,_  then promise, _Everything is fine._

She was infinite, limitless, eternal. She was bound, and infinitesimal, and nothing.

 _What do you fear?_  an echoing voice asked her.

And she saw again the eyes peering from the corners of a dark room, and felt again hands that held her down against a cold, cold floor—that pressed, and tore, and pierced her body with their sharp fingers and rising laughter.

And she saw blue light, and the sharp crack of white lightning, and the cold of death crawling toward her like a vast, black spider, its web wrapped already around two lifeless shapes to either side.

And she saw Tom and Harry and B'Elanna lying dead before her, once and twice and a hundred times in a hundred different ways.

 _No,_  the echoing voice whispered, whispered, whispered.  _This is not how it was meant to be._

Then darkness once more, and Kathryn slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd love to hear what you think - and even just if you're still reading, even after that hiatus...


	12. Part XII: Finisque Initium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look who actually got an update out! Yay me!

Part XII: Initiumque Finis

Neelix bounced on his toes outside of the captain's door, a covered bowl in his left hand and a plate of warm bread in the other. He glanced up and down the hall, then back again at the door—and with a steadying breath, he stepped forward and, with his elbow, rang the chime.

The door opened a few seconds later. It was not, however, the captain who answered. Rather it was Kes's gently smiling face that appeared. When she saw that it was Neelix, though, her smile blossomed into a wide grin. But she did not open the door any further.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. Her voice was pitched curiously low.

"I heard that the captain has a cold," Neelix said, with as bright a smile as he could force past his lips. "I thought I'd bring her some soup and bread."

Kes glanced over her shoulder, then looked back to Neelix. Her smile seemed somehow dimmer, though no less wide. "Thank you, Neelix," she said, and opened the door just wide enough that she could accept the bowl and plate from his hands.

"Is the captain alright?" Neelix asked, stepping forward and halting Kes before she could close the door on him.

"She's fine," Kes said. "I'll come by the mess hall later and get some dinner. We can talk more then. Okay?"

Neelix nodded. "That sounds wonderful, dear heart," he said. "I look forward to seeing you then." He leaned in for a kiss, and felt Kes sigh against his lips.

Then the door was shut, and Neelix was standing alone in the hall.

Neelix turned to make his way back to the kitchen, thoughts as heavy as his feet. He doubted that anyone else would have picked up on the tension and distance in Kes's voice—but he was hardly anyone. He knew her better than he knew his own ship. She was hiding something, or was afraid of something. Or maybe it was both.

He hoped, as he stepped into the turbolift, that Harry and Tom and B'Elanna would still be sitting at their table when he arrived. They could use this new information.

They were still sitting huddled together, heads bent close and shoulders hunched to keep out any prying noses, when Neelix walked into the mess hall five minutes later. They were right where he had left them.

They looked up in surprise at being interrupted by Neelix clearing his throat, but then Tom and Harry relaxed upon seeing him, and even before Neelix could ask to join them, they scooted their chairs back, and Harry motioned for him to pull up a seat.

"What's up?" Tom asked, as Neelix sat in his newly claimed chair.

"I just got back from trying to see the captain," Neelix told them. He looked around at their faces, grim and streaked with worry, and saw in them the fear beating in his own chest.

"Well?" B'Elanna prodded. "Did you see her?"

Neelix shook his head. "No. But I did see Kes. She stopped me from coming in, and took the food I brought. She said she'd come by later, though, and said that we'd talk."

Tom wrinkled his nose. "Do you think she'll tell you what's going on?"

"I don't know," Neelix admitted. "If it's something that both The Doctor and the commander want to keep secret, I don't know that Kes would tell even me."

"You really think The Doctor is in on Chakotay's charade?" Harry asked, leaning forward and bracing his elbows on the table to either side of his long-gone-cold noodles.

"If he is," Tom put in, "then it's probably really serious."

Harry shook his head. "I just don't understand why they'd keep something so serious from us."

"They wouldn't want the crew to worry," Neelix offered.

"Or would want anyone to do anything stupid," Tom added softly.

B'Elanna frowned. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"It's just…" Tom trailed off with a shrug. "I don't know about you, but if someone did something to our captain, I know I'd want them to answer for it. And—"

"And what?" B'Elanna cut in. "What are you saying, Tom?"

"What if it's something to do with the Kaminoans?" Tom said. "I was there, remember. I saw her…" He trailed off again, a very far-away look stealing into the cloud blue of his eyes.

"Tom?" Harry asked, reaching tentatively out to rest a hand on his friend's forearm. "You okay?"

Tom shook himself. "I'm fine," he said, gruff and suddenly surly.

"You never did tell us what you actually saw in there," B'Elanna said. She raised her eyebrows in question, silently urging Tom to speak.

But Tom simply shook his head. "It's not important," he said. "The Doctor said she was fine."

"But you think she might not be?" Harry said.

"I didn't say that," Tom snapped. "I just think that, if it was something to do with, well, all of that, I'd be cautious to tell the crew about it too. Especially since we're barely keeping atmosphere right now."

"Hey now," B'Elanna said, clearly incensed, " _Voyager_  is doing much better than 'just keeping atmosphere'."

Tom grinned. "I know," he said. "But it's fun to watch you jump to her defense."

B'Elanna rolled her eyes. "Jerk," she muttered.

Neelix, who had been quietly listening, leaned forward. "Regardless of the why," he said, "the fact is that they're hiding something from us."

"We think they are," Harry said.

Neelix grinned, and conceded, "We  _think_  they are, yes. But what are we going to do about it?"

Everyone looked at each other for a long second, silent and pondering. Then, carefully, Harry said, "What about Tuvok?"

"What do you mean?" Neelix asked.

"Well," Harry said slowly, "he might know what's going on. And if he doesn't, then he can probably find out."

"That doesn't mean he'll tell us, though," Tom said. "In fact, regardless of whether he knows or not, he probably won't talk to us about it."

"No," Harry said. "You're right. What else can we do, though? Unless we're going to break into the captain's quarters." B'Elanna and Tom both brightened. Harry, seeing their sudden grins, shook his head. "No," he said very firmly. "No, we're  _not_  going to break into her quarters."

"Fine," Tom said, slumping back in his chair. "But we do need to do  _something_."

"I think," B'Elanna said, sitting straight and leaning forward slightly, "we need more power."

"What do you mean?" Harry asked.

"I mean," she said, clasping her hands on her lap, "right now it's just the three—sorry, four—of us. That's just four voices against Chakotay's. But while you can ignore four, you can't ignore forty. Or fifty. If we get enough people asking about it, he's going to have to do something."

"But what if they're keeping it—whatever  _it_  is—a secret for a reason?" Harry asked.

B'Elanna pulled a face. "If that's what we believe," she said, "then why are we even having this conversation in the first place."

Silence. Then Tom said, "Okay. You have a point."

"So what do we do?" Neelix asked.

"I still think we should talk to Tuvok," Harry said.

"And we should talk to others in the crew," Tom said. He looked at Neelix. "You can probably do that better than any of us."

"Aren't you and Harry gossip central?" Neelix asked, fighting a grin.

Tom shrugged. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said with an innocent shrug.

"Who's going to talk to Tuvok, though?" Harry put in, before Tom could say anything else.

"You should, Starfleet," B'Elanna said.

Harry looked scandalized, touched with trepidation. "Me?" he asked.

"Yeah,  _Starfleet_ ," Tom said, reaching out to punch him in the shoulder. "It was your idea after all."

Harry looked from B'Elanna to Tom, then at Neelix. Then he sagged back into his chair. "Fine," he said. "I'll go talk to Tuvok."

"And we'll start talking to others," Tom said. He looked at B'Elanna. "I'm sure there are people on the holodeck right now."

B'Elanna nodded. "Right. And Neelix—tell us what Kes says."

Neelix nodded as well. "I will," he promised.

They parted ways with a few quiet words of good luck, Tom and B'Elanna toward the holodeck, Harry to go find Tuvok, and Neelix to clean up the kitchen from the dinner mess.

He was only halfway done with the dishes when Kes arrived. She kissed Neelix on the cheek, then perched on a counter while Neelix fixed her a plate of food. She accepted it gratefully, and dug into the mashed tubers sprinkled with cheese as soon as Neelix had handed her a spoon.

"A little hungry tonight, sweetling?" Neelix asked, trying to hide a grain.

Kes looked sheepish, and between bites confessed, "I haven't eaten since last night."

Neelix's eyebrows rose. "Kes," he admonished, half surprise and half worry, "why not?"

"With everything going on with the captain—" She cut herself off abruptly, and wouldn't meet Neelix's eyes, even when he stepped toward her. Instead she looked at the mashed tubers, and the off-putting scarlet meat beside it.

"What  _is_  going on with the captain?" Neelix asked. "Kes?"

"The commander asked us not to discuss it with the rest of the crew," Kes said quietly.

Neelix fought to keep his expression neutral. So, they had been right about that much, then: it was under Chakotay's orders that whatever was happening was being kept secret. And something was definitely happening; Kes had just as much as confirmed that.

Pushing aside his tumbling thoughts, he said, "Can't you tell me, at least? I am the Morale Officer, after all. I would swear not to tell anyone else."

Kes shook her head. "I'm sorry, Neelix," she said.

Neelix sighed and turned back to his dishes. "No matter," he said, picking up a plate and beginning to scrub it furiously. "Tell me about that book you said you were reading—what was it again?"

Kes relaxed visibly, and once again began to eat. " _Theorems of Molecular Decay_ ," she told him. "And it's absolutely fascinating."

~*x*~

Chakotay was ready to fall into bed for a few hours of sleep when the chime rang at his door. He allowed himself a groan, and then trudged out of his bedroom.

"What?" he asked crossly as the door slid open at his furious jab, too tired to care about manners or façades.

Tuvok, standing on the other side of the door, did not flinch. "I believe you and I need to speak," he said with perfect calm, his face a carving of serenity. He was dressed in his uniform, straight and unrumpled as if he had only just donned it, and he stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

"Can't this wait until tomorrow?" Chakotay asked, crossing his arms over his chest and trying not to glare. He was certain he knew what this conversation was going to be about, and he was willing to give anything to postpone it even a few more hours.

"I think not, Commander," Tuvok said, still in the mild tone of voice that at times made Chakotay grind his teeth.

"And if I order you to leave me alone so I can go to bed?"

"Then I will suffer the consequences of disobeying a direct order," Tuvok replied.

Chakotay sighed. "Fine," he said, and stepped back to give Tuvok room to walk past him. "Come in, then."

Tuvok slid past him, and crossed to the couch without a word. He settled onto the sofa, arranging his hands neatly on his lap, and then waited for Chakotay to join him. He did so with an unkind thought about Vulcans, slumping into the armchair he pulled over to face Tuvok.

"Well?" Chakotay asked, after Tuvok had simply stared at him in silence for the better part of a minute. "What did you come here to say?"

"What is wrong with the captain?" Tuvok asked. His words, blunt and concussive, struck Chakotay in the face and made him feel sick.

"What do you mean?" Chakotay asked.

Tuvok sighed, but did not break eye contact. "Something is wrong with Captain Janeway," he said. "What is it that ails her?"

"She has a cold," Chakotay said stoutly.

"And you and I both know that that is not the truth—or at least not all of it."

Chakotay's jaw tensed, and when he spoke his voice was terse. "Are you saying that I'm lying to you, Lieutenant?" he asked.

"I believe that you are trying to protect her," Tuvok replied, "which is a noble endeavor, but one that will aid no one—least of all her."

"And how do you know that?"

"Because I know the captain," Tuvok said. "I know her better even than you."

Chakotay bristled.

"That was not meant as an insult to you, Commander," Tuvok said. "Merely as a statement of fact. I have known her for many years more than you have—and as such, I have been with her through many trials of fire." He paused, and his eyes grew leaden with the weight of the words on his tongue. "She always seeks to weather them alone," he said at last, "but in the end, that isolation is that which cripples her."

Chakotay stared. It struck him, very suddenly, that Tuvok's calm was just as much a façade as his own. Was it not said that Vulcans felt just as deeply—deeper, even—than humans? That their logic was a shield and wall against the depth of that emotion, so that it could not rule and destroy them?

Did that not mean, Chakotay thought, that Tuvok did have emotions just as strong and deep as his own? But only that they were kept well-hidden behind a mask even thicker and more resolute than his?

With a jolt, Chakotay also realized that he had never once heard Tuvok speak so personally about Kathryn—and that what Tuvok was telling him was as much of a secret as the one that Chakotay was trying to keep now. The trust he was showing in Chakotay, to tell him this and so bluntly, took Chakotay by surprise. Ever since the beginning, Chakotay had seen himself as being on one side of Kathryn, and Tuvok on the other, the two of them never able to meet around her.

Chakotay looked at Tuvok, took in the Vulcan's still serene expression, the darkness of his eyes, the slender fingers clasped loosely in his lap, and felt as if, for the first time, he truly saw him.

Tuvok was Kathryn's oldest friend. He was, perhaps, her greatest friend. He knew already, better even than Chakotay, that Kathryn Janeway was human—that she was weak, that she was fallible, that she could be wounded and destroyed. He could tell Tuvok the truth of what was happening without risking any damage to Kathryn's image.

Yet still the words of his confession clung to the back of Chakotay's throat. Was it fear that kept them rooted in his chest, unable to come forth? Was it resentment? Was it jealousy? Or was it simply that Chakotay had kept the secret of Kathryn's illness—of her weakness—for too long, and now the words had been soldered into his body, unable to be spoken?

Tuvok must have seen the hesitation in Chakotay's eyes or face, for he leaned forward, elbows on knees, and said, "Commander." And then, softly, "For her sake."

Chakotay opened his mouth, the words sticky like soft lead on his tongue—and flew from the chair as the ship gave a sudden, terrible lurch. He hit the ground hard, the air pushed from his lungs by the impact. Through the crash of pain as his head slammed into the edge of the coffee table, he heard the first wail of the red alert.

 _"We are under attack,"_  a masculine voice said over the system.  _"Report to battle stations."_


	13. Part XIII: Insomnium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> violence and canonical character death warnings for this chapter

Part XIII: Insomnium

Kathryn stood on a plain of ice, blue and white and as sharp as the brilliant sky overhead. The bitter taste of smoke crawled into her nose and mouth to sit on her tongue and to make her cough, and her eyes watered—though whether that was from the smoke or from the bite of the wind, Kathryn could not say.

She knew this place.

"Is this what you fear, Kathryn?"

The words were carried by the wind— _were_  the wind, all cruel vowels and biting consonants. They struck Kathryn in the face, in the back, in the chest, like hail flung by a raging storm, until she clapped her hands to her ears in a vain attempt to shut them out. Blood dripped from her nose, and trailed in thin lines down her cheeks from beneath her hands.

"Is this what you fear?"

"Stop," Kathryn gasped, falling to her knees. She shut her eyes, blocking out the blue sky and white ice. "Please. Stop."

The wind calmed. "Tell me," it whispered, coiling around her, caressing her blood-stained face, sneaking through the gaps in her uniform to settle stinging against her flesh. "Is this what you fear?"

Kathryn's right leg snapped. She screamed, falling backwards to land hard on the ice. Bone ripped through skin, and the warm gush of fresh blood stood out against the cold like a punch. She gasped, fighting nausea and pain and the taste of darkness closing in, and clutched the ice that cracked, slow and long, beneath her.

"Please," she begged.

The wind howled. It struck her, pummeled her chest, tore at her hair and at her uniform with clawed fingers. "Tell me," it demanded. "Is this what you fear?"

Smoke washed over her, black and hissing and noxious. Kathryn choked—and as she choked, the smoke crawling into her lungs, she felt the right side of her chest shudder, crack, collapse beneath an invisible weight. She tried to scream, but the sound came out mangled and weak, and was accompanied by the wheeze and bubble of a collapsed lung.

"Please. What do you want?"

"Tell me," the voice moaned. "Tell me what you fear."

The light changed around her, fading from bright sunlight to the filtered light of a smoke-filled room. The air was acrid around her, and from somewhere in the haze Kathryn could hear the hiss and spit of sparks falling from a broken control panel. The ground was hard beneath her, but it was no longer the sharp cold of ice.

"No." The word was strained and accidental, pulled from Kathryn's lips by pain and white-lipped fear. "Please, no."

The smoke swirled around her, and its voice was low and hoarse. "Tell me, Kathryn," it said. "Tell me…"

Kathryn clenched her eyes tightly shut and focused on breathing.  _No_ , she told herself with her first labored breath.  _This isn't real,_  she said with her second.  _This is in the past._

"Tell me, Kathryn," the voice murmured.

She kept her eyes shut and gripped the hem of her uniform jacket with shaking fingers. Please, she tried to say.

And then another voice, weak and half a whimper. "Katie-bird?"

It had been more than a decade since Kathryn had heard her father's voice. She had, she realized, almost forgotten what he sounded like.

A hitching sob, mangled and broken, limped through the smoke. "Katie-bird," Edward Janeway said again. "Are y—" A wet, sucking cough interrupted him, and for a minute that was the only sound in the crumpled shuttle. When at last it settled, there was a long second of silence before Kathryn heard the first rattle of her father's dying breath.

She lay there, with eyes closed and fingers tangled in rumpled cloth, and fought the urge to roll over and crawl to him. She could still remember the pain, vague and half-assumed, when she had tried to do so all those many years ago. Worse, she could still remember the way the smoke had parted when she was only a few feet away, seeing for the first time Justin's broken body at the foot of his chair. She could remember the pain, paralysis, the indecision, the fear that had gripped her when she had seen him—and she could remember hearing her father's breath fall away into silence while she lay on the slowly freezing shuttle floor, unable to decide who to go to. Worst, she could still remember the unnatural stillness that had stolen into the shuttle alongside the silence. It had almost taken her heart with it.

 _Not again,_  she told herself.  _I won't let it happen again. And I won't give him the satisfaction of seeing me crawl._

"Kathryn…" the voice said. It curled around her, kissed her closed eyes and draped itself over her chest. "Kathryn, what is it you fear?"

"Go away," Kathryn said, as forcefully as she could. The words fell from her tongue ragged and limp, breathless.

"I can't."

"Can't or won't?" Kathryn asked. Bile rose with the words, buoyed by pain and encroaching tears. Through the smoke, Kathryn heard her father cough again, wet and weak and getting weaker.

The voice did not answer.

The minute it took for Edward Janeway to die felt like an eternity to Kathryn. She lay on the shuttle floor, blood seeping from her ruined leg and onto the floor, and from her ruined lung into her mouth. The salty taste of it clung to her lips, dripped down her cheek, and filled her nose with the iron. The bile sat at the back of her throat and waited.

And then there was only silence. Kathryn choked on a sob made of iron and emptiness, and the bile surged. She gagged on the taste of loss, and only barely managed to roll onto her side before she heaved. Acid and bile splashed across the bloodied shuttle floor, and the aching emptiness was filled with the sound of Kathryn retching.

When her stomach was empty, Kathryn collapsed onto her back, gasping small sobs. Uncertainty welled within her as she stared blankly at the smoke-addled ceiling above her. Should she have gone to her father? Could she have changed the outcome if she had tried?

She closed her eyes, swallowing the taste of bile and tears, and tried to shut out the wondering. To second-guess herself now would be to bring herself to ruin.

The air went cold and stale. Kathryn shivered and opened her eyes, only realizing when she tried to sit up that nothing but a lingering ache remained of the intense pain—until she slammed her head against hard metal, sending flashes of light arcing across her vision and a dull throb echoing down into her neck.

"Shit," she hissed, pressing a hand to the top of her head as she settled back down against the cold floor.

There was no light. But for all the darkness, Kathryn could not help but feel as if she should recognize where she was. There was something intensely—and terrifyingly—familiar about the cold press of metal against her skin, and about the sour, stale taste of the air in her nose and in her mouth.

Where was she? Why did she feel an overwhelming sense of terror? What was about to happen?

Footsteps. And in the echo of the footsteps, reverberating through the floor and into her bones, the words,  _What do you fear?_

Then the snick of a bolt being shot back, and a flood of light washed into Kathryn's cage. She shrunk back, lifting a hand to cover her eyes, cowering towards the back of the metal box in which she lay. Laughter, and coarse words in a foreign tongue.

And with a sick swoop of her stomach, Kathryn knew exactly where she was.

Hands reached in and fastened around her arms. Kathryn kicked, dug her toes into the mesh walls of the cage, thrashed against the fingers that fastened into her hair. She screamed, and clawed at scaled skin, and even as they resolutely dragged her forth, she fought.

"The bitch knows thinks she can fight," one of the Cardassians said above her.

"I think we should teach her a lesson," another said.

There was laughter, and the hands holding her let go, sending her tumbling to the floor. Before Kathryn could regain her bearing a boot smashed into her stomach. She coughed, scrambled for air and some semblance of footing—only to be shoved face-first into a wall by a fist to the small of her back. She felt her nose break, felt the warm gush of blood over her lips, felt herself fall dazed to the floor.

_"Doctor, get in here."_

"Is this what you fear, Kathryn?" The voice was too high to be a Cardassian voice—too high, too light, too lilting. It echoed in the ringing of Kathryn's ears, in the throb of her nose.

Another hand wrapped into Kathryn's hair. The ground slid beneath her, hard and rough against her bare feet, and then flew up to meet her. She caught herself on her hands and knees. Another boot crashed into her stomach, sending her flopping limply onto her side, every inch of air driven from her lungs.

"Is this what you fear?" the voice asked as Kathryn hit the floor.

The Cardassians loomed over her, grinning and laughing. They reached for her—and as their hands touched her, a thousand memories flashed through Kathryn's body. Bones snapped, flesh tore, blood ran, skin burned. Kathryn screamed against the hands, against the pain, against the voices running together in her ears and body and mind.

"Is this what you fear?" the voice asked.

_"We're losing her!"_

"I would have expected more of a Janeway."

"Tell me, Kathryn! Is this what you fear?"

_"I need an emergency medical site-to-site transport. Now!"_

"What would your daddy think if he could see you now, crawling on the floor at our feet?"

"Kathryn—"

_"Twelve CCs of—"_

"Poor little Ensign—"

"Kath—"

_"Kes, I need—"_

_Please_ , Kathryn thought, to the Cardassians, to the voice still echoing beside the thunderous pain, to the two worried faces appearing and disappearing above her.

_Please…_


	14. Part XIV: Pugna

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I read through the first few chapters of this again, and damn wow my writing has gotten better even just from starting this? Or at least it feels like it has.

Part XIV: Pugna

Chakotay staggered onto the bridge behind Tuvok, the bucking and shuddering deck nearly succeeding in sending them both sprawling to the ground. Tuvok veered to the right toward tactical, and Chakotay half-ran, half-crawled to his chair in the command post. The cushions and strong armrests were a relief, and as Chakotay threw himself into the chair he sent up a quick prayer of thanks to the spirits watching over him.

"Report," he snapped as soon as he had regained his breath enough to speak. The journey to the bridge, through the strobing light of the red alert and the ship trembling and twisting beneath their feet, had left Chakotay winded.

"It's the Kaminoans, sir," Harry said from his place at OPS. "Five ships."

 _Shit_ , Chakotay thought, followed by,  _Weren't the asteroids supposed to protect us?_  He pushed that trail of thought away; now was not the time to ponder how they had been found, now was the time to act.

Pale green light lanced across the viewscreen, and  _Voyager_  lurched. The shields over her bow flickered white like glass, lighting up the ice and stone of the asteroids still spinning in sight, unknowing and uncaring of the fire and fight taking place around them.

"Direct hit to the port nacelle," Harry reported, behind the concussive  _thud_  of an explosion. "We're venting plasma."

"We can't take another hit like that," Tom said from the con.

"Evasive maneuvers," Chakotay barked. "Delta-Four."

"Yes sir," Tom said, and  _Voyager_  kicked to life under his deft fingers and swung down into a low loop, twisting so that her back was ever to the nearest enemy ship.

The Kaminoan ships followed, spreading out as they did so into a curved arc. The nearest of the ships hung back a few thousand meters and continued firing its pale green lasers in pulses of two. They splashed harmlessly against  _Voyager_ 's fore shields. The other ships, smaller than the nearest and twice as nimble, raced through the orbiting asteroids in a narrowing band to either side of  _Voyager_.

"They appear to be attempting to circle us," Tuvok commented.

"Let's make that a little more difficult for them, shall we?" Chakotay said. "Tom, attack pattern Alpha-Six.

 _Voyager_  leapt forward, her engines hitching up to a high thrum. She fell into a tight spin, dropping beneath the net of ships and firing her phaser cannons in a rotating arc. Most of the shots missed the ships above them completely, but two of them struck home; the white-green light of two shields flaring lit the asteroids like fire. At any other time, Chakotay would have found the glint of light off ice beautiful.

"One of the ships seems to be breaking off the attack," Harry reported. "It's venting atmosphere and anti-matter."

"Good," Chakotay said. "Now let's take care of the rest."

Again  _Voyager_  leapt forward. She swung forward and up, cutting beneath two of the smaller Kaminoan ships and aiming for a third. They scattered before her, racing to reclaim their positions to either side; Tom deftly turned her with them, then brought her up on an even level with their prey. Belly facing the third ship, Chakotay gave the order to fire two photon torpedoes.

They struck with the flare of fire and death, the first obliterating the small ship's weak shields, the second tearing the ship to pieces. Debris scattered, fires winking out of existence as the flames devoured the oxygen to nothing, the force of the blasts sending the asteroids within a hundred kilometers spinning wildly away.

"The three remaining ships are closing in," Harry reported.

"Evasive maneuvers, Mr. Paris," Chakotay ordered.

Still the three ships continued to close. They were in an inverted arrow formation, the largest ship at the tip, the two nimbler ships at the fore. As they drew close, the larger ship once more began to fire its lasers, first in the general direction of  _Voyager_ 's bridge, then toward her deflector array.  _Voyager_  turned onto her side, letting the weapons bounce harmlessly off of her strong edge shielding.

The two smaller ships, however, did not slow. They curved over and under, spinning onto their backs as they did to fire three quick, concussive shells. The first two detonated harmlessly against her hull plating. The last four, however, hit home.

Chakotay flew from his chair, smashing his head against the floor for the second time in less than an hour. For half a heartbeat his vision went black—then everything came pouring back in. Smoke and fire and the groans of wounded men and women, the bitter taste of burning plastic and wires, the warm drip of blood down his cheek.

He climbed to his knees, then to his feet, and looked around. The bridge was dark but for the emergency lights, dull and flickering, and the handful of fires growing out of shattered displays and broken panels. All around him others were picking themselves up as well, shaking heads and clutching broken arms and ribs.

"Report," Chakotay croaked. He coughed, smoke clogging his nose and crawling down his throat. "Ensign Kim?"

"Ensign Kim is down," a woman said. Chakotay turned, saw amber hair and black skin, and clutched at the name that swam to the forefront of his mind:  _Lieutenant Afrah._

"Then report, Lieutenant," Chakotay ordered.

Her hands flew over the OPS panel, which was sparking ominously. She hissed in pain as a spark landed on the back of her hand, but she did not pause or even hesitated.

"Our port nacelle is ruptured," she said after a moment. "Impulse engines are down, and Decks Four and Seven are venting atmosphere."

"Reroute emergency power to internal shields," Chakotay commanded.

The lights flickered, then dimmed. Lieutenant Afrah said, "Done, sir."

Chakotay turned, looked out of the viewscreen. He could see two of the Kaminoan ships hovering before them, like sharks waiting for their kill to bleed out. They were made of a dark metal and were lit by the same pale green light as their lasers. Their engines were mounted to two angled wings, and the cockpits were situated above a pointed nose. They looked as insectoid as their creators.

"Do we have weaponry?" Chakotay asked, turning to look at Tuvok.

"Two phaser cannons are operable," Tuvok said. "Systems for launching photon torpedoes, however, are down."

"Shields?"

"Holding at twenty-eight percent," Lieutenant Afrah replied.

Silently, Chakotay cursed. They really were a kill bleeding out in the water, he thought. They barely had any weapons, and at least for the moment, they had no way of even trying to dodge a blast. If the Kaminoans wanted them dead, they were going to die.

The Kaminoans did not, however, seem intent on delivering a death blow.

"They're hailing us," Lieutenant Afrah said from behind OPS.

Chakotay frowned. "Put it through," he ordered.

The viewscreen went dark, then lit up with the interior of the largest ship. A tall, pale-faced Kaminoan sat in the command chair on a dais at the center of the bridge, his high-collared tunic bearing the seven gold bars that Chakotay had learned meant a fleet commander.

"Well met, Commander Chakotay," the Kaminoan said. His large, bulbous head leaned forward on its spindly neck, and the black-tipped spines along its back rustled and raised. If that meant something, Chakotay did not know. "I am Fleet Commander K'Al'n," His lips pulled back from sharp, needle-like teeth.

"Well met, Fleet Commander K'Al'n," Chakotay replied, trying to wrap his tongue around the foreign name and failing tragically. The simple courtesy of the reply gnawed at him, but Chakotay did not think that provoking the enemy was in the best interest of his crew—not at the moment, at least. "What can we do for you?"

"Your ship is a b'oll'k in mud," K'Al'n said.

Chakotay blinked. The idiom was unknown, but the meaning was clear. "We are not defenseless," he said, crossing his arms. It struck him, as he did so, that it was a very Kathryn thing to do. Very suddenly, as if that thought had been the key to the dam, he wished desperately that she were here. She would know how to get them out of this predicament; she would be able to sweet-talk their way out of this, or would know exactly where to fire on to let them escape.

"Perhaps not," K'Al'n said. "But you are defeated."

"Not yet," Chakotay replied. It was half a growl and half an oath.

K'Al'n sighed, a high, whistling exhale that sounded like a bird. "If you do not surrender willingly, your ship and your crew will be taken with force."

Chakotay turned to Lieutenant Afrah. "End transmission," he snapped. The viewscreen went blank.

Tapping his combadge, Chakotay said, "Chakotay to B'Elanna. I hope you have good news for me, Torres."

 _"I'm afraid not,"_  she replied after a harrowing few seconds. She sounded harried and distracted.  _"We were at least twelve hours from getting warp back before the attack. Now we'll be lucky if we can get impulse back—period."_

"Understood. Do your best."

Chakotay turned to face the blank viewscreen. The weight of his next order sat heavy on his shoulders, black and ominous. What other choice did he have, though? What other hope did any of them have?

Tapping his combadge again, Chakotay said, "All hands—prepare for boarding."


	15. Part XV: Invadere

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update. Many thanks to Helen and absynthe for the beautiful beta job. The next chapter is written and done, and will probably be posted on Wednesday or Thursday - though I could maybe be convinced to update it earlier. My hope is to have this finished written by the end of August...but we'll see.

Part XV: Invadere

The Kaminoans came in squads of ten. Their shuttles punched through  _Voyager_ 's hull, opened like poisoned flowers, and vomited warriors dressed in chitin armor, bearing swords on their hips and what looked like compression rifles in their four arms. They shot rapid, angled beams of light that smoked when they hit the walls and floor and burned when they struck flesh.

Chakotay crouched beside Mike Ayala and Corani Afrah, rifle of his own couched in the crook of his arm. Around the corner came the sounds of a Kaminoan squad, voices high and whistling as they spoke in their own tongue, with words and code that the Universal Translator could not decipher.

Ayala tapped Chakotay on the shoulder and made a swift, cutting motion with his hand, three fingers extended. Chakotay nodded, and held up his own hand, curled into a fist. He pumped it once, twice, three times—and with a burst of power Ayala somersaulted around the corner, landing on his shoulder and coming up in a crouch, firing even as he moved.

Chakotay and Afrah followed, coming out behind Ayala's covering fire, Chakotay in the lead. He fired off a short burst over Mike's head, and heard the satisfying  _thunk-crack_  of energy discharging against flesh. One of the Kaminoans howled—and then a second scream joined the first as one of Mike's shots hit home.

Recovered from their surprise, the Kaminoans opened fire. Pale light flashed overhead, to hit the walls and ceiling above and behind with sizzling force. Heat glanced across Chakotay's cheek, leaving a stinging burn.  _Too close_ , he thought, ducking a second too late.

"Fall back," he called, reaching out to touch Mike on the shoulder. Even with their two companions on the ground, the Kaminoans still outnumbered Chakotay, Mike, and Corani almost three to one. "Regroup at Junction C-6."

Ayala nodded, and from the corner of his eye Chakotay saw Afrah already begin to retreat. He followed her lead, placing one foot behind the other and continuing to fire, aiming at the line of encroaching Kaminoans. They hissed, their spines rattling when the yellow-orange fists of light hit too close—but still they pressed forward, two of their hands reaching for the twin blades strapped to their sides.

 _Uh-oh_ , Chakotay thought—but as before, he was a second too late.

The first Kaminoan leapt forward with a shrieking cry, bringing its swords down in a swooping cut. Ayala lunged backwards, tripped on his heels, and fell with a cry. He landed awkwardly on one shoulder and rolled, barely missing the blades as they arced down toward his back.

Chakotay darted forward and grabbed the back of Mike's uniform jacket. He hauled him to his feet, then pushed him forward and down under the Kaminoan's upraised arms. "Go!" he shouted—and Mike sprang forward, seeing the same opening Chakotay had.

They ran half-doubled, dodging Kaminoan arms and legs, barely believing their luck. The world was a tangle of limbs, of guns, of blades glinting in the flashing strobe of the now-silent red alert. And then, as sudden as a slap, they were free and clear.

Shots fired, and missed, to either side of them as they sprinted for the corridor junction ahead. Red and pale green light mixed and bled together, lighting the hall before them and throwing racing shadows against the walls.

Ayala, ahead of Chakotay by a step, hit the bulkhead shoulder-first. He spun, using the momentum to turn him in the direction he wanted to go, and took off again. Chakotay bent at the waist and, using a trick he had learned while running from his sister, let his feet slide out from under him. Shifting his rifle into his left hand at the last second, he let his palm slap the ground and slide him to a halt. The skin burned, and Chakotay knew it would hurt every time he tried to close his fingers—but as he dug his toes into the ground and launched himself forward, disappearing around the corner just as a fresh volley of pale light smeared the floor where he had been a second before, he figured the sacrifice was worth it.

"What about Afrah?" Mike asked through heavy breathing, turning as Chakotay caught up to him halfway down the next hall.

"She's on her own," Chakotay said.

Mike nodded. "And what are we going to do?"

They spun around another corner and came to a panting halt. They turned and listened, rifles at the ready. When they heard no movement from either side, they settled down against the wall in a crouch.

"What we have been doing," Chakotay said, at last answering Mike's question. "We take out as many of these insects as we can, and hope or pray that it's enough."

Mike looked long and hard at Chakotay. His pale face shone in the scarlet light, giving him the appearance of wearing a mask of blood, and his eyes were gaunt pits of shadow. "We have no hope of winning this," he said, voice low but curiously calm. "You know that, right?"

Chakotay looked at his old friend, and saw in his face the very same despair that yawned between his ribs. "I do know," Chakotay said. "But we can do our best. We owe her nothing less."

"Her?" Mike asked. He paused, and when Chakotay did not speak, said, "Do you mean  _Voyager_? Or do you mean her captain?"

Chakotay did not speak. He checked the charge on his rifle, and then stood up with a decisive  _click_  as he shot the battery home. "Let's go," he said.

They encountered another patrol two corridors down. They downed three Kaminoans, and then beat a hasty retreat back the way they had come.

"We're going to run into the other patrol," Mike pointed out.

"Then I think it's time to get off this deck," Chakotay said.

They crawled into the nearest Jeffries tube, locking the hatch behind them. Then, on hands and knees, with rifles banging the backs of their legs, they crawled halfway across the deck, then took a ladder down two stories. When they at last emerged on Deck 8, it was to a silent and empty corridor.

"How many do you think are left?" Mike asked as they shut the hatch behind them.

"I don't know," Chakotay replied. It wasn't something he wanted to ponder.

They were almost to the next hall junction when Chakotay's combadge chirped.

_"The Doctor to Commander Chakotay."_

Chakotay and Mike stopped and looked at each other. With trepidation, Chakotay reached up and tapped his 'badge. "Chakotay here," he said. "What is it, Doctor?"

 _"We need your help,"_  came The Doctor's hushed voice.  _"Kes and I are trapped in a supply closet on Deck Four. The captain is with us and needs medical attention. There are Kaminoans in the hall outside, and I fear it's only a matter of time before they find us."_

Chakotay watched Mike's expression harden, a mirror to his own. "Understood," he said. "We're on our way."

The fifteen minutes it took for them to reach Deck Four were agony. Images of the Kaminoans finding Kathryn and the others kept playing and replaying in Chakotay's head; he saw again and again her slumping boneless to the deck of her ship, a hole blasted through her chest. And, selfishly, he kept thinking that their last conversation—real, proper conversation, when both of them were conscious—was that afternoon in her ready room when they had fought.

He didn't want that to be the way it ended.

"How are we going to do this?" Mike asked, when at last they were crouched together beside the hatch leading out onto Deck Four.

"We try to take them by surprise," Chakotay said. "So far we've mostly been fighting defense. They won't be expecting an attack."

Mike nodded. "Okay," he said. "Then let's do it quiet."

Chakotay nodded. The ghost of a grin tugged at the corners of his lips, and he said softly as Mike reached for the latch, "Just like that one time on Bowark Nine. Remember?"

Mike shook his head. "How could I forget?" he asked. "We were supposed to be doing a stealth mission, and you screwed us over the first five minutes on the ground. And here we all thought that Natives were supposed to be one with the forest."

"Shut up," Chakotay hissed, though there was no venom to the words. "Or this time you'll be the one to blow our cover."

They eased the hatch open, then crawled out. The corridor was empty in both directions, and they shared a long look steeped in many years of camaraderie and friendship. Then Chakotay nodded, and Ayala nodded in return, and they parted ways, Chakotay to the right, Ayala to the left.

It was quiet—eerily so. Even in the wee hours of ship's night, the hum of the engines was ever-present, the whine of the lights just barely beyond conscious hearing. Now, though, there was nothing—only the flash of crimson red alert lights, and the soft tread of Chakotay's boots on the thin carpet.

Then, voices. Chakotay slowed, straining his ears to hear them better. They were high and nasal, foreign words on foreign tongues, a garble of translated and untranslatable that made listening to them a labyrinth of language. It made Chakotay's head hurt.

He crept forward on silent feet, gripping his rifle in sweat-slick palms. He would draw them out, then away from the supply closet that was down the hall. He had no way of knowing if it was the one that The Doctor had called him from—but regardless, if he could induce the Kaminoans to chase him, that would mean that many less on the search for Kathryn and the rest.

Chakotay rounded the corner—and froze.

The supply closet door was already open. Kes and The Doctor knelt with their faces to the right-hand wall, hands folded atop their heads. Four Kaminoans stood over them, rifles trained on their backs in silent, deadly warning.

Kathryn lay on her back in the middle of the hall, head lolling and arms limp at her sides. She was unconscious, though whether from the fever or because of some other injury dealt to her, Chakotay could not be certain. She was pale, and as still as death beneath the bloody light.

Chakotay raised his rifle and fired.

It was over almost before it began. The Kaminoans closed around Kathryn, blocking her from Chakotay's sight, and raised their weapons to their shoulders. One blast took Chakotay in the shoulder, and another snapped the rifle from his hands. He fell to his knees, dizzy and disoriented and trying to remember how to breathe, and when he managed to lift his head again to look for Kathryn, or The Doctor or Kes, it was only to see a long-limbed Kaminoan approaching, tall and looming in the dim light.

"What do you want with her?" Chakotay gasped out, with tongue numb and voice thick. "Why do you want her?"

"She was the Chosen," the Kaminoan said, words stiff and stilted, as if it were speaking carefully to a very young child. It halted in front of Chakotay and looked down, down, down at him. "She was meant to stand the trials."

"What does that mean?" Chakotay asked. "What—"

"There is no time," the Kaminoan said, cutting Chakotay off. It lifted its rifle, pointed it at Chakotay's chest, and fired.

Chakotay fell to the ground unconscious, the faint singe marks on his uniform smoking slightly. His last sight was of two Kaminoans lifting Kathryn into their long, spindly arms. And then—nothing.


	16. Part XVI: De Morte

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh gosh, it's been like two weeks now since I updated. I'm so, so sorry y'all. This chapter was even written already >.> Please forgive me. Anyway, it's extra long this week. Hopefully that'll somewhat make up for the delay. I hope you enjoy!

Part XVI: De Morte

Kes knew the instant Kathryn Janeway died.

Her cry for The Doctor was a scream. He came running, wide-eyed and as pale as a being programmed and constructed by photons could be, flurries of questions and demands already pouring from his tongue even as he entered Kathryn's bedroom.

"We're losing her," Kes said, stepping back to give The Doctor access to the bed. "She's not breathing and her heart stopped." She hesitated, seeing The Doctor do the same, and then explained, "I felt it happen, Doctor."

The Doctor hesitated only for a fraction of a second, hands poised over her neck in a half-aborted move—and then he stood back and ordered, "Begin mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. We need to get air to her brain until we can get her back to Sickbay."

Kes leapt forward and bent to force the captain's lips apart. In the background Kes heard The Doctor call for an emergency site-to-site transport for the three of them—and then all sound and sight and feeling was lost as the tingle of the transporter took hold. When sensation returned, Kes was kneeling on the floor in the middle of Sickbay, her mouth pressed to Captain Janeway's as she breathed for her.

The Doctor was a whirlwind of movement above and behind Kes. He knelt once to affix a cortical stimulator to the captain's forehead—it buzzed once, twice, three times at The Doctor's command, and the captain's body arched with the energy of it, her eyes remaining closed—then again to tear away the soft grey cotton of her shirt and press breath support nodes to her chest. They beeped once, then fell silent—and the captain's chest remained as unmoving as before.

The Doctor did not curse aloud, but by the look on his face, Kes suspected the words were in his heart and mind. He stood quickly, and moved off again, out of sight.

Kes looked down at the captain. Her skin was ashen under the bright Sickbay lights, her face still and pale. Kes wondered if anyone had ever seen the captain so still—so resolutely without movement, without spark, without life.  _Perhaps Tuvok_ , she thought.  _Perhaps Chakotay_.

And then The Doctor was shouting at her to begin mouth-to-mouth again. "She's not responding—" Kes heard him say, only for the rest of his statement to be lost as The Doctor ran for the far side of the room. She bent, and again began to breathe for both her and her captain.

The Doctor returned a minute later, a laser scalpel and a piece of long, clear tube in his hands. He set the objects down on a tray beside the center biobed, then hurried over to kneel across from Kes.

"We need to get her up," he said. "Help me lift her."

They carried the captain to the biobed in an awkward shuffle, Kes holding her shoulders, The Doctor her legs. They laid her down, still and ashen and limp.

"Assist me," The Doctor ordered, not sparing Kes a look as he quickly sterilized his hands and then turned to retrieve the objects he had set down on the tray. "I've never performed this type of surgery before—it's halfway barbaric, and its use has only been recorded a handful of times in the last century or so."

"What do you need?" Kes asked, cutting him off before he could spiral. When he was nervous or uncertain, he had a tendency to lapse into giving increasingly superfluous lectures about obscure information—though he would, of course, deny that fact with his every photonic breath.

"Hold her head still," The Doctor ordered, returning firmly to the present.

Kes gripped either side of the captain's head in her small hands. Her skin was shockingly dark against the captain's, bronze against ivory.

"Ready?" The Doctor asked.

"Yes," Kes said, still not knowing what exactly she was saying she was ready for.

The Doctor turned on the laser scalpel and, moving with painful precision, lowered it to the captain's neck. Her skin split in a thin line, red and bloodless, beneath the scalpel's edge. One millimeter, two—then a centimeter, then an inch.

When he was satisfied with the breadth of the cut he had made, The Doctor switched off the scalpel and reached for the tube. With one hand, he pinched the split skin apart, and with the other he maneuvered the tube's lip to the opening. Then, with a deft movement, he slid the tube down into the captain's throat, then deeper into her chest.

"Done," The Doctor said, when all but the last inch of tubing had been threaded into the captain's body. He then reached for the breath support nodules and tried again to activate them.

They beeped once, twice—and the captain's chest rose and fell, then rose again. The faintest whistle of air passing through the tube was just on the edge of Kes's hearing.

"Doctor?" Kes said, uncertain.

"I need twelve CCs of zolpidem-CV," The Doctor said by way of answering.

Kes prepared the hypospray with steady hands that belied the tremor of her heart. Just how close had they come to losing their captain? Too close—that much was certain. Her mind had gone dark, black as night and blacker still, until that third pulse of the cortical stimulator. Kes could now feel the faintest thread of light that was the captain's consciousness, pulsing and weak against Kes's own mind. But for how long? And what would it take to keep her body breathing, her mind alive?

"Here, Doctor," Kes said, returning to the biobed and placing the hypospray in The Doctor's hands. In turn, he pressed it to the captain's neck, and with a  _snick_  the drug bled into her veins.

Her eyelids fluttered.

"Captain?" The Doctor asked, drawing nearer to her and coming to a halt in her line of sight. "Captain, can you hear me?"

A long moment of silence. Then, slow and heavy, her eyes opened and she looked up at The Doctor. Her mouth opened, her lips and tongue moved—but no sound came out.

"Don't try to talk," The Doctor said quickly. "I had to perform a tracheotomy."

The captain blinked up at him. She shivered weakly, and her gaze slid toward Kes.

"I'm here, captain," Kes said, moving around the foot of the bed to stand across from The Doctor. She reached down and took the captain's hand in both of hers.

The captain's fingers tightened against Kes's, warm and thankful.

"Good," The Doctor said with a widening smile, seeing the movement. "That's good, captain! Now, can you wiggle your toes?"

In reply, the captain moved her toes. The Doctor beamed, and patted her on the shoulder. "That's good," he said again. "Very good. Now, I'm going to put you back to sleep. You need to rest if you are to continue fighting this disease, whatever it may be."

The captain jerked. Panicked, she looked over at him, eyes wide. She reached for him, trembling and struggling. Her fingers plucked at his sleeve. The Doctor looked down at her, confused and concerned.

"What is it?" he asked.

The captain shook her head, the smallest fraction of a movement. Her face was pale and lined with fresh sweat, and a small droplet of blood beaded at the edge of the tube where it met her skin.

"You don't want to sleep?"

Again, the captain shook her head.

"No, you don't want to sleep? Or no, that's not it?"

"Squeeze my hand if it's that you don't want to sleep," Kes said. "If it's not that shake your head."

The captain clutched at Kes's hands. Kes looked up at The Doctor, and gave a slight nod.

"Regardless of what you want," The Doctor said, "you need to sleep. I'm sorry, Captain, but—"

She cut him off, and moving from his sleeve to his hand. She clutched at him, and her chest rose and fell in rapidly. Between them, the cortical stimulator whined, warning them of an increase in heartrate.

The Doctor grasped the captain's hand. "Easy, Captain," he said. "Please, don't strain yourself. We can keep you awake for a short period of time," he said, relenting, "though not for more than a few minutes." She relaxed against the bed, and the tempo of her breathing eased, the whine of the cortical stimulator disappearing.

"In the meantime," The Doctor said, extricating his hand from hers and bustling around the head of the bed and toward a display, "I have a few ideas that might help bring down your fever. While you're awake I'd like to run a few tests, if that's alright with you, Captain."

The captain nodded.

The Doctor was halfway done preparing the first test when the attack came.

Kes fell as  _Voyager_  lurched, hitting the biobed in front of her and sprawling over the captain's chest. She felt the captain grunt beneath her, though there was no sound, and then gasp for breath. Kes picked herself up as quickly as she could, fighting the twinge of bruised ribs.

The Doctor, as a being made of photons and lines of code, had kept his balance. He turned, instruments in hand and eyes wide, to look at Kes and the captain. "What was that?" he asked, though by look in his depthless eyes he already knew the answer to his question.

Movement caught Kes's eye. She looked down at the captain, and watched as again she moved her lips. She spoke steadily, slowly, soundlessly enunciating each syllable.

 _Kaminoans_.

"Kes," The Doctor ordered, springing into action, "prepare for casualties."

Kes squeezed the captain's hand once and smiled encouragingly down at her. Then she pulled away from the captain's grasp and set to work.

She was halfway through tending to her third patient—a crewman named Gordon with a badly broken arm, two cracked ribs, and internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen—when Chakotay's announcement echoed through the ship.  _"All hands,"_  he said, voice issuing from each combadge, a hundred voices from one,  _"prepare for boarding."_

"I'm fine," Gordon said, as soon as Chakotay's voice had died away, trying to sit up out from under Kes's hands. "Let me go."

"You need to lay back," Kes said, soft but firm. "The Doctor will be here to perform surgery shortly."

"I need to help," Gordon said. "If you'll just—"

Kes laid a hand on Gordon's shoulder and pushed him down. He coughed, blood speckling his lips, and collapsed back against the bed. "Please," he mumbled.

"Lay still until The Doctor comes," Kes ordered.

The door opened and two more crew members came in, an Andorian ensign and a human lieutenant. Both bore burns on their faces, and the lieutenant was supporting the ensign with an arm around her waist.

"We were at a console that blew," the lieutenant said. Kes thought she remembered that his name was Doran. "Mayleen caught the worst of it. She was unconscious for twenty seconds."

Kes hurried over to them and wrapped Mayleen's free arm over her shoulders. "Let's get her to a biobed," she said, and guided the way over to the last remaining open biobed. Together she and Doran lifted Mayleen up, then helped her lay back. She groaned, and bit her lip.

From her peripheral vision, Kes saw The Doctor approach Gordon, medical tricorder in one hand, padd with Kes's appraisal of his injuries in the other.

"Just lay still," Kes ordered, pulling out a medical tricorder of her own. She scanned Mayleen's prone body, registering the numerous burn warnings that flashed across the screen and the multiple organ failures.

Kes laid a hand on Mayleen's, and gave a gentle squeeze. "You're going to be just fine," she lied, and then added, "I'm going to give you a mild sedative to help with the pain. The Doctor will be over shortly."

Once the sedative was administered, Kes turned to Doran. "Sit," she ordered, pointing to a chair between Mayleen's and Gordon's beds. "I need to treat those burns."

"Surely you have more important things to do," Doran protested.

"Not at the moment," Kes replied steadily. "Now sit."

He did as she bade, perching gingerly on the edge of the chair with hands clasped in his lap. Kes retrieved a dermal regenerator and began the arduous process of repairing the multiple third-degree burns smattered over the man's high-browed face and neck. He grit his teeth and bore the pain of skin and nerves regenerating with a tense jaw and knuckles white from clenching his hands together.

Four more crewmembers came in while Kes was tending to Doran. She directed them to empty chairs, assessed each of them for critical damage, and alerted The Doctor to the worst of the injuries. The smell of blood and bile slowly filled the infirmary, causing Kes's stomach to twist into knots. It had been a long time since she had been sick from the sight and smell of injured men and women, but even now it made her gut clench.

She was moments away from being finished healing Doran when she heard the doors open again. Kes turned, expecting to see more injured—but instead she saw five tall, looming Kaminoans dressed in dully shining armor and carrying guns.

"Do not move," the first Kaminoan said, advancing into the room, rifle sweeping across the line of biobeds and their occupants. "The first to move will be shot."

Tension gnawed through the room, every person frozen where they stood or sat, watching as the Kaminoans filed in, waiting for someone else to make the first move. The four following Kaminoans spread out in a semicircle once they had cleared the door, guns aimed at the Starfleeters, while their leader crept farther into the room.

When it was mere feet from the nearest biobed, the Kaminoan leader stopped, head bent and spines stiffening. Then it turned and, reaching up to tap a small ridge of skin beneath its ear slit, said, "K'or'n to Fleet Commander." A beat of silence, and K'or'n turned toward its troops, lifting a hand to signal, then aloud, "I've located Captain Janeway."

Whatever the Fleet Commander said in response was inaudible to Kes. K'or'n, however, must have heard something in reply, for it gave a curt nod and, turning to the four others standing just inside the doorway, made a cutting motion with one of its four hands. They moved forward as one, holding the crewmembers at bay with guns pointed at their chests.

The Doctor stepped forward, ignoring the snap of movement as half of the guns in the room turned to point to him. "Captain Janeway is very ill," he said sharply. "Moving her now could kill her."

Still K'or'n came on.

"I'm warning you," The Doctor said, taking another step forward. "As her medical officer, and as a skilled physician, I—"

K'or'n had reached The Doctor. With a single, smooth motion, the Kaminoan drew one of its swords and brought it down on The Doctor's shoulder. He stumbled, shunted to the side by the force of the blow, his expression one of shock and dismay.

And still K'or'n moved toward the captain lying defenseless and weak on the biobed, blade drawn, spines bristling.

It was a meter from her when Gordon leapt from his bed with a wild scream. He crashed into K'or'n's back, knocking him two steps forward and then down to his knees. Kes watched in horror as, with a jerk and a jolt, three of K'or'n's spines ripped through the skin of Gordon's back. "You won't fucking  _touch_  her," he yelled, blood bubbling into his mouth and over his lips with every word, and reached for K'or'n's thin neck. With hands wrapped around its thin jaw, Gordon let himself drop. The sick  _crack_  of bone snapping rang out through the suddenly still and silent room, and man and alien fell in a tangled heap to the floor.

It was the key to the dam. As the two bodies struck the ground, the rest of the Starfleeters capable of standing rose to their feet and launched themselves at the invaders. Surprised, the Kaminoans did not immediately fire, and two of them fell beneath fists and boots before they could reach for the long, twin swords hanging at their hips.

The Starfleet victory was short-lived. Even as they were driven back to the Sickbay doors, one of the Kaminoans lifted its head and gave a great, undulating cry filled with an ear-wrenching series of clicks. Doran, who had pushed Kes aside when she had tried to keep him back, leapt at it—only to be struck to the ground as the doors opened and a fresh wave of Kaminoans poured in, swords and guns upraised.

A hand latching around Kes's elbow made her jump and gasp. She whirled, expecting to see a looming insectoid towering above her—but it was only The Doctor.

"Quick," he hissed, dragging her toward the central biobed. "We have to get her out of here."

"What about the risk of moving her?" Kes asked.

"I was lying. It's inadvisable, but it won't kill her."

"And what about them?" Kes asked, glancing over her shoulder at the swiftly falling crewmembers. The floor was daubed with blood and with the fallen, and Kes thought she could just glimpse a severed hand that looked like it belonged to Doran.

"What do you think we can do for them?" The Doctor asked. He shook his head. "The best thing we can do is use their distraction as a chance to get the captain out."

Kes forced herself to turn away from the battle. She knew The Doctor was right, even in that knowledge felt like a thorn inside her heart.

The captain was still conscious, if only just. She had pulled herself almost into a sitting position, and now lay propped up on her left elbow. Her face was as pale as bone, and a thin line of sweat had gathered at her hairline. Her mouth hung open in what could only be shock. She was trembling, and her right hand was clasped white-knuckled in the tattered ends of her split shirt. She was looking, Kes saw, at Gordon's body lying half-visible beneath K'or'n's.

"Come on, Captain," The Doctor said, coming to a quick halt at her bedside. "We have to get you out of here."

The captain shook her head, still looking first at Gordon's body, then up at the battle. When The Doctor reached for her she jerked away from his touch.

"Captain," Kes said softly, coming up to her side, "please. If we don't get out away from them, then Gordon's sacrifice will have been in vain."

Finally, finally the captain looked away from her people fighting and falling. She looked at Kes, trembling and pale and in shock, and reached for her with a grip like a drowning woman. Kes took her hand in her own and gripped it tightly.

"Come on," she said. "Please."

The captain nodded.

They helped her to her feet. She stumbled, and the air whistled from the tube in her throat. But then she steadied, in spite of the fine tremors wracking her body, her grip on their shoulders tightening and her spine straightening. She nodded again, and together the three of them made for the Jeffries tube hatch at the back of Sickbay.

They crawled in one after the other, The Doctor first, then the captain, then Kes. Kes turned back at the last second and looked at the waning battle. The Kaminoans were forcing the last standing Starfleet crewmember to his knees, one rifle in the small of his back and another at his temple.

With a tug, Kes latched the Jeffries tube hatch, cutting off her sight of the nightmare.

Two minutes into their crawl through the Jeffires tube, the captain collapsed. One second she was crawling behind The Doctor, and the next she was on the floor.

"Doctor," Kes cried, and then hurried forward on hands and knees to kneel by the captain's side. Her eyes were half open, but when Kes rolled her over all she could see was blood-shot white. Her head lolled against the floor, every muscle in her ravaged body limp. "Doctor!" Kes cried again.

"We'll have to get out of here," The Doctor said, crouching at Kes's side. "There's no way we'll be able to move her and protect ourselves, if the Kaminoans catch up."

"We don't even know if they've discovered the Jeffries tubes," Kes pointed out.

"Can we risk it?" The Doctor asked. "When they do, we'll be mice trapped in a fish bowl."

Grudgingly, Kes admitted he was right.

There was an access hatch ten feet down the tube. Working together, Kes and The Doctor dragged the captain to it. When they opened it, it was to a calm and silent corridor.

"You first," The Doctor whispered to Kes.

Kes climbed out of the Jeffries tube and, after peering both ways once more, turned back to the hatch. She opened her arms, and slid her hands beneath the captain's shoulders and back. Then, moving carefully backwards step by step, she slid the captain out into the corridor. The Doctor came behind, inching her forward and holding her legs.

As soon as the captain was free of the Jeffries tube, The Doctor motioned for them to set her down. He knelt by her head, felt for her pulse, pulled back an eyelid.

In the distance, back toward Sickbay, came the sound of heavy footsteps and murmured chittering. Kes and The Doctor looked at each other, both with eyes wide and breath shallow in their chests.

"We have to hide," Kes said, ignoring the surge of misplaced righteous anger—The Doctor had been right to suggest they leave the Jeffries tube. Their timing had simply been very poor.

The Doctor nodded. "No time to get her back in the Jeffries tube," he said, and looked frantically around. Then, "There," he said, and pointed to a supply closet half a dozen steps down the hall. "We'll hide in there until they're gone."

The closet was small and cramped. There was barely enough room for the three of them to fit; Kes stood with an ear pressed against the door, listening for the footsteps and voices of the Kaminoans coming and going, while The Doctor knelt on the floor with the captain propped half in his lap. It was dark, the only light a sliver of strobing red that crept in at the bottom and edges of the door, illuminating the shelves filled with cleaning supplies in vague half-shadows.

Kes barely dared to breathe. The light beneath the door was blocked, then freed, then blocked again as the Kaminoan soldiers marched past, speaking in the garbled tongue of their own language that the Universal Translator couldn't match. Then—silence.

"I think they're gone," Kes breathed, and opened the door a crack.

She peered out, looking both ways. Silence. She dared to open it another inch, tasting cool air and light. And then voices, and the tramp of footsteps on carpet. Kes yanked her head back and shut the door with a snap.

"They're still out there," she whispered. "I don't know how many, or where they are exactly, but they're in the hall. What should we do?"

"We need help," The Doctor said.

"Who can help us?" Kes asked.

"Maybe the commander," The Doctor suggested.

"How do we know he's not captured without alerting the Kaminoans to our presence?"

"We can only try."

Kes heard the shuffle of cloth against cloth, and then the ping of a combadge being activated. "The Doctor to Commander Chakotay," he murmured.

There was an awful moment of silence in which Kes held her breath and begged her heart to beat silently. And then, just as softly,  _"Chakotay here. What is it, Doctor?"_

 _Thank the Caretaker,_  Kes thought briefly.

"We need your help," The Doctor said, speaking as hushed as possible while still being audible. "Kes and I are trapped in a supply closet on Deck Four. The captain is with us and needs medical attention. There are Kaminoans in the hall outside, and I fear it's only a matter of time before they find us."

 _"Understood,"_  came Chakotay's prompt response.  _"We're on our way."_

"Now what?" Kes asked.

"Now," The Doctor said, and in the half-light Kes caught a glimpse of him settling deeper into his crouch and pulling the captain more securely into his arms, "we wait."


	17. Part XVII: De Aere Ad Lucem Viridem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the gap in updates. For those who don't know, I was in the hospital for the majority of this last week. It was an altogether unpleasant (read: nightmarish) experience, and I intend to never in my life go back. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this chapter. It gave me a lot of grief, and it's not the best...but hopefully it's still enjoyable!

Part XVII: De Aere Ad Lucem Viridem

Chakotay woke to the taste of copper in his mouth and a roaring pain behind his eyes.

He sat up gingerly, feeling each of his limbs in turn. They tingled and ached, and with each movement it felt as if a dozen ants crawled along the inside of his skin. It made his teeth hurt and his head spin, until the only thing he could do was lean over and throw up what was in his stomach.

"It has quite the aftertaste, doesn't it?" a voice asked from beside Chakotay.

Chakotay sat up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "You can say that again," he said, turning to look at the person beside him.

It was Tom.

 _Voyager_ 's pilot looked about like Chakotay felt. He was pale, his lips and eyes too red for his face, and his hands fluttered against the cloth of his pants in nervous agitation. Singe marks marred the shoulder and stomach of Tom's uniform, and a bloody abrasion stood out in stark relief on his right cheek.

The smell of bile was thick on the air, making Chakotay's stomach clench in uncomfortable knots. The red alert had still not been turned off, though it had been silenced, and the corridor in which he and Tom sat was intermittently bathed in scarlet light and shadow.

They sat against the left-hand wall, their backs to the bulkheads. When Chakotay rose up onto his knees to peer over Tom's head, he saw that many more members of the crew seated or kneeling, clumped together in twos and threes or huddling miserably over their knees. Kaminoan guards walked up and down the line, guns held at the ready. He counted at least five, and he guessed there were more hidden by the curve of the hall.

 _Damn_ , Chakotay thought, settling back down.  _How the hell are we going to get out of this one?_

"We've gotten ourselves in quite the pickle," Tom said, unconsciously mirroring Chakotay's thoughts.

"We have," Chakotay agreed. Keeping his voice low, he added, "Any ideas?"

Tom shook his head. "I'm afraid not," he said. "Do we even know what they're after?"

Chakotay's stomach unexpectedly clenched again, and for a long second all he could do was focus on breathing as his gorge rose. Memory flashed back and forth across the black of his eyelids as he leaned over, eyes shut tight, and tried not to throw up again; he saw her, again and again, lying limp on the corridor floor, Kes and The Doctor held at gunpoint beside her, the Kaminoans circling around like vultures around a carcass.

"Commander?" Chakotay heard Tom say, and then felt a hand fall on his shoulder.

"I'm fine," Chakotay said through the waning nausea. "I'm fine." He straightened, clenching his hands tightly together in his lap.

"Do you know what they're after?" Tom asked. He looked at Chakotay shrewdly, bright blue eyes piercing in the fresh wave of crimson light.

Chakotay nodded. "I do," he said.

"And?" Tom asked, when Chakotay did not offer anything else.

"Kathryn," Chakotay said. Then, more firmly, "They were after the captain."

Tom frowned. "The captain?" he asked. "What do they want with her?"

"They said something about some "trials" she was supposed to complete," Chakotay said. "They called her the Chosen."

"The Chosen?" Tom echoed. His frown deepened. "That doesn't sound good."

Chakotay shook his head. "No," he said weakly. "It doesn't."

"So, what do we do?" Tom asked.

"I don't know," Chakotay said. He buried his face in his hands and, muffled by his palms, said again, quieter and weaker, "I don't know."

They had her. After weeks of chasing them, the Kaminoans had finally caught up—and this time,  _Voyager_  had been on the losing side. Which meant they had her, and could now do with her whatever they wanted.

And what  _was_  it they wanted from her? What trials were she was supposed to complete? What did it mean that she was "the Chosen"? Were they going to kill her? Experiment on her?

"Do you think this has anything to do with what's been going on with the captain?" Tom asked.

Chakotay's head jerked up. "What do you mean?"

Tom looked long and hard at Chakotay, blue eyes burning embers set in the shadows of his face. "Something was going on with the captain," he said, voice low and hard as iron. "I don't care what you said—something was wrong, and we knew it."

Chakotay swallowed thickly and looked down at his hands. Tom's voice was even, but the iron carried and uncomfortable bite to it.

"What was it?" Tom asked. "And do you think it could have anything to do with the Kaminoans?"

Of everyone Chakotay thought he would finally confide in, Tom was nowhere near the top of the list. He had not even been on the list, in fact. While he was no longer the irresponsible, impossible young man he had been, he was yet impetuous and hot-headed, and was not someone Chakotay would have ever dreamed in confiding to.

Yet here Chakotay was, sitting beside Tom beneath the watchful gaze of their captors, with Kathryn captured and possibly dying beneath their hands. Suddenly the daunting prospect of confessing what he knew was no longer so massive—even to Tom. The words rose in his mouth, large and impossibly potent, impossible suddenly to keep to himself.

"She's been sick," Chakotay told Tom, looking up and meeting his gaze once more.

Tom pulled a face. "Yeah, we'd gathered that much at least."

Chakotay shook his head slowly. "No," he said. "She's sick— _really_  sick. We had to resort to a cold-water bath twice to bring her temperature down."

Tom's eyes widened. "Damn," he murmured.

"Just before I was captured," Chaktoay went on, "I got a call from The Doctor. He was calling for backup. He and Kes had the captain in a supply closet on Deck Four, and there were Kaminoans looking for them. He said the captain needed medical attention."

"Well?" Tom asked, when Chakotay didn't continue.

"Mike and I went to help them. When I found them, Kes and The Doctor were being held at gunpoint, and they had Kathryn laid out on the ground. Just before I was stunned, I saw them pick her up."

"Shit," Tom breathed. "And you think her sickness has something to do with her being the Chosen?" Tom asked.

"I don't know," Chakotay said softly. "But they had her for twelve hours. That's a long time for nothing to have happened. And they've spent so much time and so many resources trying to recapture her—I don't know how the two things couldn't be linked."

Tom opened his mouth, but before he could speak a harsh voice cut him off. "On your feet," one of the Kaminoans ordered, stepping close. "Put your hands on your head."

Chakotay shared a look with Tom before nodding once. They rose slowly, linking their hands atop their heads. Over Tom's shoulder, Chakotay watched as the rest of the crew began to follow suit.

Once everyone was standing, their Kaminoan guards stepped closer still to prod them into a straight line. For half a moment, Chakotay thought about jumping the nearest guard—but then he dismissed that idea as foolhardy and stupid; jumping the guard would do nothing but get himself, and those who followed his example, shot. While he and his crew outnumbered the Kaminoans, the Kaminoans were armed and his crew was not—and they were prepared for an attack. It would be better by far to wait for a more opportune moment to effect their escape.

With harsh voices, the Kaminoans ordered their prisoners to start walking. Chakotay obliged grudgingly, as did the rest of the long, shuffling line.

They were led through the winding corridors, Kaminoans walking alongside the Starfleeters with guns trained and expressions harsh. They muttered when the Starfleeeters tried to slow, or tried to drag their feet. "Move on," the Kaminoan guard closest to Chakotay snapped, and moved to give him a shove.

They were halfway to their destination when Chakotay realized where they were going: Shuttlebay 2. The realization sunk through Chakotay's mind like a lodestone, and felt like a punch to the gut.  _This isn't good_ , he thought, even as he rounded the last corner and came face-to-face with the open shuttlebay doors.

 _Voyager_ 's shuttle sat in its landing dock, hulking and silver and squat next to three smaller ships that were of alien design. They were made of a sleek black metal that was dully reflective, with wings that angled sharply down from the main compartment like shark fins. There were wide, yawning hatches at the back of the shuttles, and each of them stood open and waiting, landing ramps lowered to the floor.

They filled Chakotay with a lurking, gnawing sense of dread.

"Groups of fifteen," barked the Kaminoan that had pushed Chakotay. The captives responded only after a long few seconds of sullen resentment, and they shuffled their feet and slouched their shoulders, silently resisting the order with every second.

The guards moved among the Starfleeters, pushing and shoving and hassling them until at last they were satisfied with each group. The Kaminoans then prodded their captives toward the waiting shuttles.

Chakotay and Tom were at the back of their group as they were led up and into the last of the shuttles. The metal landing ramp echoed under their booted footsteps, loud and hollow. And then the green-lit shadows of the shuttle interiors swallowed them, and they were ghosts in the faint light.

They were led through a circular door, which rolled back into the wall with a hiss and a clank, and into a wide storage area. The floor was grated, the walls seamless metal panels that glowed with terminal interfaces. Small, green-hued lights sat in recesses in the ceiling, blanketing the compartment with an eerie, uneasy glow.

"Sit," one of the Kaminoans ordered.

Grudgingly, Chakotay obeyed. Tom sat beside him, shooting him a black look as he did so, a dark question buried in his eyes.  _How much longer?_  he asked, and his hands curled into fists in his lap, white-knuckled and trembling.

Chakotay shook his head.  _Not yet,_  he warned Tom silently. They were at even more of a disadvantage now; Chakotay and his crew were split up, and were seated. Their armed guards had not only the advantage of weapons, but the advantage of leverage. To try to fight back would be futile at best.

The door ground shut, and the floor shivered and began to thrum. The Kaminoan guards took seats on the benches that lined the walls, guns resting on their laps, eyes hard and heavy on their captives. The engines whined—and then Chakotay felt the lurch of movement, of inertia dampeners realigning as the ship exited  _Voyager_ 's artificial gravity.

The trip was short. No more than three minutes later, the floor gave another lurch, and then the engines began to whine down. The Kaminoans stood and, motioning for their captives to stand, hustled them back the way they had come and out of the shuttle.

Chakotay found himself in a huge loading dock. Half a dozen shuttles like the one that had transported him and his crew sat on launch pads. The walls were the same seamless paneling that had formed the shuttle walls, but the light here was bright and yellow and came from floodlights mounted from the ceiling. Two large doors sat open opposite the forcefield that protected the ship from the vacuum of space.

"Come," the leader of the Kaminoans said. The rest of the guards tightened around Chakotay, Tom, and their crew, and then marched them away from the shuttle and toward the doors. As Chakotay peered around himself, he saw that another of the docked shuttles was in the process of divulging more of his crew.

They were led through twisting corridors and into a lift which took them down to a lower deck. The green light of the shuttles followed them, interspersed with the warmer, yellower lighting. Chakotay and his crew moved as slowly as they could, and Chakotay spent the time trying to memorize their path, the hall junctions, the paneling—anything that would give him and his crew an advantage when at last they made their bid for freedom.

At last they came to a long corridor with open rooms to either side. The shimmer of a forcefield, and the lack of furniture but for benches that lined the walls, gave Chakotay an idea of where they had been taken: the brig.

"Inside," the leader said, running one of his hands over the glowing panel to the side of the first cell. The forcefield flared then fell away.

Chakotay was about to step across the threshold after Tom when, to his surprise, he felt a heavy hand fall on his shoulder. He turned, and looked up into the leader's dark eyes.

"Not you," the leader said. "You come with me." He hit the wall panel again, and the forcefield sprang back into life.

Chakotay glanced at Tom, standing just on the other side of the forcefield. Tom nodded.  _I've got this,_  he seemed to say.

Chakotay nodded in return.

"Lead the way," he said, turning and looking up at the Kaminoan again.

The Kaminoan grunted, likely hearing the derision in Chakotay's voice. But he merely pushed Chakotay down the hall and, with his gun planted in the small of Chakotay's back, took him back the way they had come.


	18. Part XVIII: Magisterque Discipula

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay in updates. writer's block is a bitch.

 Part XVIII: Magistrique Discipulae

The emptiness of the Void opened its arms and embraced Kathryn Janeway.

She stood upon the emptiness, upon the blackness, and stared ahead at the shadows that coiled and writhed on nameless winds. She stood, and she listened, and she waited. And the nameless winds blew and coiled and writhed around her, tugging at her hair and at her clothing, until it looked as if she stood still and silent within a gale.

"Virgil," she said at last, and her voice was the tolling of a church bell calling for Mass. It echoed and rang until the nameless winds shouted with the memory of it.

The Void buckled, and thickened-and coalesced, until standing before her was the shape of a man, faceless and as empty as the Void which had birthed it.

"Kathryn," the shape said, and the voice was the same that had called and questioned Kathryn for what now felt like an eternity.

"Virgil," Kathryn said again, and the shape nodded.

"Hello, Kathryn," said Virgil. "It is good to finally see you."

Kathryn peered at Virgil and frowned. Narrow lines had appeared since she first saw him, delineating narrow eyes and a thin mouth.

"Why am I here?" Kathryn asked. "And who are you?"

"I am your guide," said Virgil. "And you are here to stand the trials."

Kathryn frowned. "What trials?"

"The trials of my makers," Virgil said.

"And what do these trials entail?"

"They are meant to judge you and your crew."

"To judge us?" Kathryn asked. She shook her head. "I still don't understand."

"What is it you fear?"

"Stop asking me that, dammit," Kathryn snapped.

But Virgil shook his head. "I cannot," he said. "Not until you answer me: What is it you fear?"

"Stop asking me that," Kathryn snarled again, and she took a step forward.

Virgil backed up a pace, and the thin lines of his face contracted into what looked like fear. "You cannot hurt me," he said, and his voice was the strength of the storm undercut by soft, spring rain—bold but fragile. "You cannot touch me."

Kathryn took another step forward and, reaching out, seized Virgil around the wrist, halting him from taking another step back. "I think I can," she said, and her voice was a warning.

Virgil now definitely looked afraid. "You do not understand," he said, seemingly suddenly small and very frail. "You do not know what you are contending with."

"A small little man who gets off on the fear of others?" Kathryn asked, hard and cruel.

Virgil laughed. And suddenly he was no longer the fearful, shrunken man he had appeared to be; he seemed to grow, shoulders broadening and legs lengthening until his wrist was torn from Kathryn's hold and he stood towering over her.

"I am not a man, Kathryn Janeway," he said, "and you would do well to remember that here you are in my domain. Here you are under my power."

There came a grinding roar, like a tornado ripping through trees, and the empty world beneath Kathryn's feet opened up. She fell.

When Kathryn opened her eyes, it was to the red sky and dusty air of a Vulcan desert. Kathryn sat up slowly, gingerly feeling each muscle complain in turn, and climbed carefully to her feet. The fine sand shifted beneath her boots, and the wind tugged at her hair and uniform jacket as she stood, spitting grit into her face and making her cough.

"Kathryn."

Kathryn turned quickly at the sound of her name, and found herself standing in front of Tuvok. His face was impassive and stern, and his hands were folded into the loose, trailing sleeves of a traditional Vulcan robe. He was an impenetrable shadow at the heart of the sand and wind and sky, untouched by the elements, unbothered by the heat.

"Tuvok," Kathryn said, with some relief. "You scared me."

"That was not my intent," Tuvok said. Then, after a moment of silence in which Kathryn tried, and failed, to find something to say, Tuvok said, "Do you know why I have brought you here?"

Kathryn looked around herself. In the near distance rose the great Mount Cohsarn, an eons-dead volcano that still rose in craggy magnificence to the clouds. Behind them, almost lost to the desert haze, was the shadow of the city of Kahairn, where Tuvok lived with his wife T'Pel.

"You brought me out here once before," Kathryn said, looking once more up at Tuvok. "This is where you taught me to meditate."

"Indeed," Tuvok said. "But that does not answer why I brought you here now."

Kathryn frowned, and looked around herself again. "I don't know why," she admitted at last. "I don't even remember the journey coming out here."

"You have always said that you appreciate my candor," Tuvok said, not answering Kathryn's silent question.

"I do," Kathryn said.

"Then I feel it prudent to tell you now that I think you were in error to destroy the Caretaker's Array."

Kathryn looked around herself again. "But we made it home," she said, and gestured around herself to the desert, to Mount Cohsarn, to Kahairn.

"No," Tuvok said—and as the word left his lips, the scenery bled to wax around them, then fell in a cascade of sand to the ground, where it washed around Kathryn's boots like waves of dust. In its place stood a stark and bleak landscape: barren rock, grey sky, and a few stunted, half-withered trees.

"No," Tuvok said again. "You did not."

And then, as if a veil had been snatched from her eyes, Kathryn saw, resting amid the broken stone of the earth, countless mounds of stone erected in crude but careful cairns.

"You damned us, Kathryn Janeway," Tuvok said, and his voice was the tolling of a bell, the echoing ring of finality and eternity. "You killed us all, all to save the Ocampans from a fate they may never have even faced."

Kathryn was breathless. Thoughtless. Hopeless.

"No," she whispered. She turned on numb feet and stumbled toward the nearest grave. "No, please…"

She fell to her knees, and did not wince as the rough stone cut through the cloth of her pants and into her flesh.

Tuvok stood behind her, watching as she knelt beside the graves of those she had sworn to protect and guide, stern and impassive like the stones of the tombs beneath his feet, his face drawn in narrow lines of shadow.

~*x*~

El'mar of Beckhan Cove was not having a good day.

"Eight ships destroyed," Dor'tek, the High Admiral of the Kaminoan Fleet, all but yelled. He was sitting behind his desk in his office, El'mar standing before him with his hands clasped behind his back. The early morning sun filtered in through the windows at Admiral Dor'tek's back, wan and pale through the ever-present clouds scudding overhead. "More than four hundred lives lost. And all for what?"

"We had no choice," El'mar said, protest in his voice. "We had to collect Captain Janeway."

Admiral Dor'tek's flint eyes glittered slate. "Did we?" he asked. His voice had gone suddenly calm, calmer than it had been since El'mar had entered the office. He did not think that boded well.

"The Council decided—"

"I know what the Council decided," Admiral Dor'tek said in reply, still with that poisonous calm.

They looked at each other for a long moment, slate eyes on black. When Admiral Dor'tek did not make a move to speak again, El'mar said carefully, "Is that all, High Admiral?"

Admiral Dor'tek nodded. "Dismissed," he said.

El'mar bowed, and backed out of the office.

He made his way down to the first floor of Fleet Central Command, distractedly ignoring the numerous greetings he received as he went. He instead watched the mosaic tiles beneath his feet, and looked up at the vaulted and tiled ceilings, lost in thought.

A short speeder ride later, and he was back at his lab.

"What did the High Admiral want?" Cos'ak, El'mar's assistant, asked when he entered.

"He wanted to inform me that Captain Janeway has been retrieved," El'mar said. He crossed to the nearest table and flicked his eyes over the equipment sitting there—numerous tubes filled with multi-colored liquids that frothed and bubbled over blue flames—grounding himself with the comfortable sight and scent of his work.

The third floor of the United Confederation of Science's Laborator, UCSL, where El'mar had his lab, was sprawling. Larger than the first and second floors, with the last third of the building supported on pillars grounded in the UCSL's courtyard, it was made primarily of windows and glass walls. El'mar's lab was in the west corner of the floor, and as such two of its four walls looked out over the sullen grey of the sky and the stark grey of the courtyard's pavement.

His lab itself was cluttered, but in such a way that it was at once obvious that it was in a particular order. There were five lab tables scattered throughout the room, each bearing different experiments in different stages of completion.

"So they did get her then," Cos'ack said, spinning on his lab stool to follow El'mar's trek through the room.

El'mar nodded. "At great cost to us," he added, somewhat bitterly. "The High Admiral was furious." El'mar hesitated, wondering if he should speak on or if he should hold his tongue. At last, with the thought, _Gods damn the politics of it all,_ he said, "The High Admiral didn't seem pleased." Of everyone in El'mar's life—including his partner and their daughter—he trusted Cos'ack the most. He was not only intelligent, but he was also wise, and knew when and where to hold his tongue.

"With the retrieval?" Cos'ack asked.

"With the whole situation."

"But the Council—"

"I know. The Council voted for it. And I think the Council made the right decision. But the truth of it is that we lost eight ships trying to retrieve her. Is her life really worth that?"

Cos'ack rose from his stool and threaded his way through the lab tables. "You sound yourself unsure," he said, the skin on his brow creasing in a frown.

El'mar shook his head. "No. It's not that I'm unsure. I think the right decision was made. But I can understand why there are those angry with the Council's decision."

"Do you think they will cause trouble?" Cos'ack asked.

"I hope not," El'mar said. "But I am almost certain they will."


	19. Part XIX: Revelare

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #plot twist

Part XIX: Revelare

The Kaminoan brought Chakotay to a small room near the fore of the ship. The far wall looked out on the stars streaming past in a blurred version of warp. A desk and two chairs stood to the right, and a low table surrounded by a low-slung couch and two more chairs filled the space to the left.

A Kaminoan sat behind the desk, dressed in the sharp grey of their uniforms. Two silver medals hung on his breast, and the uniform's stiff collar sported two gold bars—rank insignia, Chakotay suspected.

The Kaminoan escorting Chakotay snapped to a quick salute upon stepping into the office. The Kaminoan behind the desk nodded, then with one of his hands motioned them inside.

"Please," he said, looking at Chakotay, "take a seat." He then looked to Chakotay's escort and, with a nod, said, "You're dismissed, Cor'cak."

"Sir—" Cor'cak began.

The Kaminoan behind the desk's expression hardened, and after another second Cor'cak bowed low. "Yes sir," he said, and then backed out of the room.

"Please," he said again, looking at Chakotay still standing in the doorway and motioning at one of the two chairs sitting in front of his desk. "Take a seat."

Chakotay moved slowly, warily. He sat uncertainly, folding his hands in his lap, perching on the edge of the chair where he could leap to his feet in an instant.

The Kaminoan settled back into his own chair, folding both pairs of his hands in front of him. "Firstly," he said, "I would like to welcome you to the _Bay'mar'at_. I am Duv'ast Borlack, captain of this vessel."

Chakotay stared at him for a long, hard moment. Then, tersely, he asked, "What do you want with us?"

"I know this may be difficult to believe," Captain Duv'ast said, "but we in truth of fact are attempting to save you. Or, rather, to save your captain."

Chakotay's hands tightened around each other, knuckles turning white. "How is that?" he growled.

Captain Duv'ast sighed. "It is a long story," he said, "and one that involves a great deal of Kaminoan culture."

"I've got time," Chakotay said.

"Yes," Captain Duv'ast said. "I suppose you do.

"First you must understand that our culture is built around the Ancient Code of Honor. Part of this Code entails how we are meant to care for, and interact with, outsiders."

"Does that Code include capturing and experimenting on guests?" Chakotay asks, cutting in.

"As a matter of fact, yes," said Captain Duv'ast. "Though that is only a part of it."

Chakotay's eyes narrowed. "Then what is the rest of it?" he asked.

"We as a people are wary of outsiders," Captain Duv'ast said. "Because of this, before we are willing to allow any outsiders to pass through our region of space, we require that they undergo a series of trials that ascertain their nature of character and principle."

Chakotay remembered the Kaminoans in the hallway clustered around Kathryn. _She was meant to stand the trials_ , the one Kaminoan had said, after calling her The Chosen. His hands tightened further still, until his nails dug scarlet crescents into the skin on his knuckles.

"Is that what is wrong with Captain Janeway?" Chakotay demanded.

Captain Duv'ast inclined his head. "The Chosen is infected with nanites. They simulate a grievous disease, which is the first step in the trials."

"Why?" Chakotay asked, voice thick, words straining past his teeth. "What could that possibly prove?"

"The crew's reaction to their diseased captain is part of the trials," Captain Duv'ast explained. "The fever also serves as a gateway to the rest of the trials. That is to say, it allows the nanites to integrate with The Chosen's mind, and thus initiate The Chosen's trials."

"And what are those trials?"

"They are tests of character," Captain Duv'ast explained. "They challenge The Chosen in a variety of ways, and their reaction to those scenarios is recorded and analyzed."

"Why weren't we told any of this before?" Chakotay demanded.

"As I said," Captain Duv'ast said, "the crew's reaction to the fever is part of the trials. How they react to their captain falling ill is very telling of their principles as a group of people. I must add, while we have had crews attempt to find their captain, none have succeeded—before you."

Chakotay remembered the spike of fear he had felt when he had been told that Kathryn had disappeared. He remembered giving the order for the crew to find her—to find her at any cost. He remembered the flush of relief that had washed through him when, after almost twelve hours, Tom Paris had contacted him to report that Kathryn was found.

"So all of this," Chakotay said slowly. "All of this was because of some sort of fucked up test to determine what kind of people we are?"

"Yes," Captain Duv'ast said.

"Fucking hell," Chakotay cursed. "Why didn't you just _tell_ us?"

"We tried."

"No," Chakotay snapped. "No, you didn't. All you did was demand we hand over our captain. Which you should have realized by then that we weren't going to allow that. Even if our going to find her wasn't hint enough, that we were willing to destroy your ships should have been."

Captain Duv'ast's face creased into what Chakotay suspected was a frown. "Speaking of which," he said slowly, "I feel the need to warn you that not all of our people are pleased with the decision to retrieve her."

"Why did you?" Chakotay asked. "Were your trials really worth the lives of your people?"

"It wasn't just the completion of the trials that led us to hunt you down and retrieve her," Captain Duv'ast said. "The fact of the matter is, without our interference, your captain would have died. And that would have been in direct violation of our Cod of Honor— _The blood of a guest is not to be spilled, for the blood of a guest is worth that of five._ "

"More than five Kaminoans were killed trying to capture us."

"I know," said Captain Duv'ast. "Thus why there are many Kaminoans unhappy with the decision to retrieve your captain at such a great cost—including some on the Kaminoan High Council."

Chakotay pinched the bridge of his nose and fought to keep his temper in check. "Is there anything else I should know?" he asked.

"The reason your captain has continued to grow more and more ill," Captain Duv'ast said, "is because she has not had a guide to lead her through the trials. A guide will of course now be sought for—but I warn you now that it may be too late. Never before have we attempted to integrate a guide in so late in the trials."

"What does that mean?" Chakotay asked.

"It means your captain may yet die. We will do all we can to keep her alive—but our aid may already have come too late."


	20. Part XX: Effugium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it's been like what...three months since I updated? I'm also sorry it's so short, and definitely not my best writing. Hopefully it won't be nearly as long until my next update, and I think the next one will be longer too... I will admit though, encouragement and people holding me accountable will definitely help me keep writing, and you can do that by reviewing.... Just a thought ;)
> 
> Thank you for reading though, and I hope you enjoy!

Part XX: Effugium

"What did they want?"

Tom settled down beside Chakotay, back against the wall, legs outstretched. He had given Chakotay space right after he had returned, a hand signal and a few quiet words keeping the rest of the crew in the cell away from him. He had seen the black look on Chakotay's face, and known it for what it was—a warning.

It had been almost an hour since Chakotay's return, however. And Tom was tired of waiting.

Chakotay's hands, resting in his lap, tightened into fists. "Bastards," Chakotay muttered darkly. His voice carried a rich, deep anger that burned red and dangerous and full of a hate that Tom hadn't known Chakotay was capable of.

"Commander?"

Chakotay flattened his hands against his thighs. "It was them. It was them all along. And we were all just rats in their twisted little experiment."

"Commander?" Tom said again, carefully. He had never seen Chakotay like this before, and it scared him.

Chakotay sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, the anger that so frightened Tom bleeding out of him in long, slow, painful waves. "You might want to settle in," Chakotay said at last, once his breathing had evened out from ragged bursts into a deep, rhythmic cadence. "This is probably going to take a while."

~oOo~

Harry Kim was restless.

Hours earlier, he and nineteen of his fellow crewmates had been shepherded past cells already filled with Starfleeters and into a cell of their own. The forcefield had gone up, and then they had been left alone but for the two guards that periodically appeared outside of their cell, armed with guns and glares.

"What do you think they want?" Lyndsay Ballard asked. She was sitting next to Harry, legs stretched out in front of her, feet nearly touching Amanda Smith's across the way.

Harry shook his head. "I don't know," he said grimly. "But they clearly were really serious about getting us." _You don't throw dozens of ships at someone unless you really want them_ , Harry added silently.

Lyndsay sighed and let her head fall back against the wall behind them with a soft _thunk_. "I hate this waiting," she said. "It's killer on the nerves."

Harry made an indistinct noise of agreement. Across the way, he saw Amanda nod her head.

"If only someone would come in," Harry said. "We could jump them. Or at least try to get some answers."

More sounds of agreement, and a rippling wave of nods. Everyone, it seemed, was as restless as Harry.

Time passed slowly, stretching on and on with the all the density of eternity. Harry stood and paced up and down the cell, stepping over feet and legs. He was joined by Lyndsay once, and once by Amanda, and a dozen times with other members of the crew. Each time one joined him, they spoke quietly, with hushed words and of hushed plans.

Harry had just sat down after yet another lap around the cell when the sound of footsteps came down the hall. Then a harsh, angular voice ordered everyone in the cell to move against the back wall.

Harry leapt to his feet and motioned for his crewmates to back against the wall. They obeyed, but Harry could see the tension and anticipation in each of the faces he glanced at. This was what they had been waiting for.

He gave a slight nod—and received a handful of nods in return. They would follow his lead, and would follow the plan, rudimentary and desperate though it was, that they had all discussed with him.

The forcefield fell. The two guards stood in the opening, guns settled in the crooks of their arms. The second guard was also carrying a pot that smelled faintly like beef stew.

"Stay back," the first guard warned, and then the second stepped into the cell.

Harry lunged. He tackled the second guard, knocking him to the ground with a clatter and a splash of gravy over floor and walls. The Kaminoan yelled, high and chittering, and broke Harry's fall with his body. Then hands, grasping at Harry's hair and face, shirt, arm. He rolled off of the Kaminoan beneath him, hitting the ground with a thud. He crambled upright.

The Kaminoan rose as quickly and squared off across from Harry, knees bent, four arms spread wide and ready for his next attack. Its gun lay out of reach against the far wall. They circled each other. Every second Harry half expected to feel the sting and bite of the other Kaminoan's gun—he even heard the _spit-crack_ of a gun discharging—but it didn't come. All that came was the sound of his breath in his ears, and the shudder of his feet against the grated floor.

A yell, and then the Kaminoan charged. Harry braced himself, readying himself to leap aside—but the hit never came. There was the sharp _crack_ of something hard hitting bone, and the Kaminoan slumped to the ground, unconscious.

Lyndsay appeared above the downed Kaminoan, the now empty and slightly disformed stew pot in her hands.

"Thanks," Harry said.

"No problem," Lyndsay replied, dropping the pot beside the unconscious Kaminoan.

Harry looked around him. The others were already hurrying to the other cells in the brig, keying down the forcefields holding their companions. In seconds, the hall was filled with the black, blue, red, and yellow of Starfleet uniforms.

Together, Harry and Lyndsay dragged the two unconscious Kaminoan guards into their now-empty cell. Then Harry triggered the forcefield and stepped away, satisfied.

"What's the meaning of this?"

Harry turned, surprised at the tone of voice—harsh and upset, and if Harry didn't know better, scared—to see Chakotay pushing his way through the crowd of Starfleeters, Tom at his shoulder. Harry stepped forward and stiffened to a salute.

"We managed to get the best of the two guards," he said, and then stepped aside and motioned so that Chakotay could see the two unconscious Kaminoans in the cell behind him. "Is that a problem?" he asked, a frown beginning to steal away the thrill of triumph he had felt at the Kaminoans' demise.

"Spirits," Chakotay hissed. He did not look pleased, Harry thought.

"Should we not have done that?" Harry asked, prodding. He looked at Tom—Tom, who seemed to share their commander's upset. His face was drawn and ashen, and his mouth was a thin, hard line. "Tom?" Harry asked, taking a step forward, toward his friend. "What did we do wrong?"

"The Kaminoans are, believe it or not, trying to help," Tom said. "Or at least that's their story."

"Help us?" Harry asked, doubtfully. "The captured our ship and put us in cells. How is that _helping_?"

"It's the Captain," Chakotay said bluntly.

Harry, still confused, looked to Tom for a translation.

"Her sickness," Tom said, meeting Harry's eyes over Chakotay's shoulder. "It was caused by the Kaminoans. They say they're trying to save her."

"And you believe them?" Harry asked, voice shrilling with disbelief.

Chakotay shook his head, but said softly, "Yes." He looked troubled, however—troubled and uncertain, two things Chakotay rarely was. To see him thus now was deeply unsettling to Harry.

"What do we do?" Harry asked, looking at Tom, then back at Chakotay.

Chakotay was silent for a long moment, eyes roving over the Starfleeters milling about the hall. He glanced once over his shoulder, toward _Voyager_ and escape. At last he looked back at Harry and Lyndsay standing behind him. "Now," Chakotay said, just as softly as before. "Now reclaim _Voyager_. And we go look for answers— _real_ answers."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember, reviews are like liquid gold - and it pays just like gold too, because it helps me to write more faster!


	21. Part XXI: Nostrum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who reviewed! I hope this chapter continues to satisfy. Also many thanks to Helen for her amazing beta work.

Part XXI: Nostrum

Chakotay, Tom, Harry, and Tuvok, who had joined them at the door to the brig and insisted he accompany them, stole down the long, curving hallways of the Kaminoan ship, alternately bathed in washed-out green and pale, yellow light. The pattern was indistinguishable to Tom, but he figured there had to be some rhyme of reason to it—either that, or the Kaminoans were less scientific than they seemed.

Under the command of B'Elanna and Mike Ayala, the rest of the crew had been sent to go find and attempt to retake _Voyager_. "I expect our ship to be ours again by the time we get back with news of the Captain," Chakotay had said by way of farewell. B'Elanna and Mike had both grinned and nodded, seeing in him the spark that had made him the best Maquis captain from their base—the determination, the concrete faith in their performance, and the certainty that they would take the day, all tinged with a hint of wildfire. It had been a long time since either of them had seen that spark; that fire had been tamed by Captain Janeway, for good or ill.

"Where do you think she is?" Tom asked. The four of them were huddled together at a hallway junction bathed in yellow light. The edge of the gun Chakotay carried, liberated from one of the Kaminoan guards, dug into Tom's ribs, making him squirm.

"If they're doing what they said they'd do," Chakotay whispered back, "she's probably in their sickbay."

"And where is that?" Harry asked.

"I have no clue," Chakotay said.

"Logically," Tuvok said, chiming in for the first time since they had left the brig, "assuming the Kaminoans follow the same patterns of logic as most humanoid species, their medical bay will be close to the heart of the ship, as that is the best protected area."

"Makes sense," Tom said. "So where are we in relation to the heart of the ship?"

They made a guess, and struck out in what they hoped was the right direction. Five times they had to duck into a side corridor or double back to avoid a group of Kaminoans walking the halls. Twice Tom thought that they were going to be discovered—but the Kaminoans were oblivious to the intruders, confident as they were in their total triumph.

 _Idiots_ , Tom though. _Arrogant idiots_. He hoped _Voyager_ 's crewmembers wouldn't be so blasé with an entire crew of prisoners in their brig.

And then their luck ran out.

They rounded a corner, Chakotay with their single gun still in the lead, and ran straight into a group of Kaminoans. Their chattering stopped at once in stunned surprise, and for a painful second there was only silence, frozen breath, and indecision.

The moment shattered, and panic and adrenaline and desperation crashed through them all, sweeping them up and into frenzied battle.

Chakotay fired once, twice, three times, and the Kaminoan in the lead fell like a stone, shirt smoking gently. Tom watched as the thin wisps vanished into the air. And then the Kaminoans were upon them, swinging knuckled fists, grabbing with long and bony fingers, lashing out with elbows and feet and knees.

Tom ducked a swing and came up on the inside, ramming the Kaminoan attacking him with his head. The Kaminoan grunted and stumbled back, and Tom followed through with a kick to the alien's right knee.

But the Tom's opponent was not so easily defeated. With a surge it regained its feet, and it lashed out at Tom. Tom only just managed to deflect the blow with his forearms, but the blow sent him staggering. He ducked again, feeling the rush of air from another punch dance across his cheek, and tried to dodge sideways, looking for another opening.

Pain exploded in his right temple as the Kaminoan's third fist snuck in from the side. With a gasping grunt, Tom fell to his knees, eyesight swimming, shadows crawling into the corners of his eyes. The ground was hard beneath him, the air cold on his face as he reeled, the world unsteady around him.

Hands fastened into the front of Tom's uniform jacket, and then he felt himself hoisted into the air. There was the breath of movement around him—and then the air was knocked from Tom's lungs as his back smashed into the corridor wall. He gasped and gaped, a fish out of water, unable to breathe, unable to cry out.

More movement. And then the sharp shock of his back slamming into the wall again.

Tom squirmed, fighting the hard hands in his uniform jacket, fighting the shadows oozing over his sight. His fingers scrabbled at one of the Kaminoan's wrists, feeling warm blood pool and streak across his fingertips, and heard the Kaminoan cry out and jerk away.

Tom landed on the floor with a hard _thud_. He coughed, dragging in pained breath after pained breath, and then staggered to his feet.

The Kaminoan was before him, undamaged fists already clenched and poised to strike. Tom ducked, lifting his arms to shield his face, waiting for a blow that never came.

There was a thud, and then silence. Tom peered around his crossed arms, and found himself staring up at Tuvok standing silent and stalwart as ever. The Kaminoan Tom had been fighting lay at their feet, unconscious.

"Thanks," Tom said, straightening.

"Certainly," Tuvok replied, and then turned away.

Tom took stock of his companions. Chakotay seemed to be the most hurt; he sported a black eye that was already threatening to swell shut and a broken nose, blood drying on his upper lip and chin. Harry was nursing a finger that, when Tom sidled up to him and asked what was wrong, he said he thought was probably broken. Tuvok alone among them seemed unhurt.

"I recommend we hide the bodies promptly," Tuvok said, turning to level a steady gaze on Chakotay.

Chakotay nodded. "I saw a door a little way back down the hall," he said, voice thick with blood and pain. "Let's stash them there."

They each grabbed a Kaminoan and dragged them down the hall, back the way they had come. When they reached the door, Chakotay armed the gun, then motioned for Harry to trigger the opening sensor.

The door slid open to reveal a janitorial closet. It was small and cramped, filled with cleaners and various unknown pieces of equipment, likely meant to serve as brooms, mops, and other such cleaning paraphernalia.

They stuffed all but one of the Kaminoans into the closet, then shut the door, Harry kicking one of the alien's feet to get the door shut all the way. The last one—the one Tuvok had rescued Tom from—they dragged farther down the hall and into a small inset. Chakotay handed off the gun to Tuvok, who stood in the entrance with Harry, then knelt with Tom beside the unconscious Kaminoan.

Half a dozen taps to the face and a curse later, the Kaminoan woke with a groggy groan.

"Who are you?" it asked, looking from Chakotay to Tom, then back to Chakotay kneeling over him.

"Where's Sickbay?" Chakotay asked.

The Kaminoan frowned. "Sickbay?" it repeated.

"Yes," Chakotay snapped, somewhat testy. His voice came out far gruffer than Tom suspected he intended, the broken and bloody nose warping his soft tenor. "Sickbay, the infirmary, the medical wing..."

The Kaminoan's frown deepened, lines creasing between his brows and on his forehead. "And why should I tell you?" he asked.

"Because we're asking nicely?" Tom suggested.

The Kaminoan snorted and did not answer.

"You can answer us," Chakotay said, rising slightly to tower over the Kaminoan, "or you can go in the closet with the rest of your friends."

"I have no reason to help you," the Kaminoan spat. "You aren't going to hurt me. The worst you might do is stun me."

"Says who?" said Chakotay.

"No one has to," the Kaminoan replied. "If you were going to hurt me, you would have done so already."

A war seemed to wage behind Chakotay's eyes, dark and bleak and dangerous. For a second his fingers flexed into a fist—but then Chakotay sighed. "You're right. We aren't going to hurt you." He rose, turned to Tuvok, and reclaimed the gun. He lowered it, and shot the Kaminoan in the chest. The Kaminoan slumped back, unconscious.

"Well that was a waste of time," Chakotay said.

"Commander," Tuvok said, stepping back and turning to face Chakotay, "more are coming."

As one they all shrank back, pressing themselves against the walls of the small inset. Chakotay shifted the gun so that he could bring it up in an instant to fire, but kept it close against his body.

Then Tom heard footsteps—many footsteps, belonging to many feet. Tom held his breath, and fought the urge to shut his eyes, as if by blocking out the sight of the Kaminoans he would hide himself from their view.

"—I heard that," one of them was saying.

"Do you think one of us will get a try at being a guide?" another said.

"I don't know," said a third. "They haven't even tried one yet. Chances are they'll find someone before it gets to us."

"You know what they're saying," the first said.

"I know, I know," the last said. "But still…"

Then they were gone, the footsteps and voices receding down the hall, vanishing beneath the hush of air from vents and the hum of engines underfoot.

"Well that was close," Harry murmured, pulling away from the wall and looking around at the others.

"Do you think they were talking about the Captain?" Tom asked.

"I don't know," Chakotay said. "Right now we don't have enough information. So let's get this Kaminoan in with the others, and then find their sickbay."

They dragged it down the hall and stuffed it in the closet. Again, Harry had to kick a stray foot so that the door would close. Then they were off, creeping down the corridor with Chakotay and his gun leading.

Halfway down the next hall, Chakotay lifted a hand. Harry, Tuvok, and Tom all came to a quick stop behind him. Tom looked questioningly at Harry, who shrugged.

Then Tom heard what Chakotay had heard: voices. He strained his ears to decipher what was being said, but all he could pick up was the faint murmur of indistinct words. Tom wondered how Chakotay had even noticed the sound.

Motioning for them to follow him quietly and carefully, Chakotay slid noiselessly down the corridor and toward the source of the voices.

"—she ready?"

Tom held his breath and strained his ears to hear the faint words

"Yes, sir," a second voice, low but with a shrilling edge, said.

There was a moment of silence, and Tom feared he had lost the voices. Then, suddenly, the first voice said, "Initiating interface in three, two, one—"

Chakotay motioned them forward. Tom darted across the hall behind him, pressing his shoulder against the wall and sliding forward after his commander. He could hear and feel Harry following him.

A strange humming grew louder the closer they drew to the doorway now visible a dozen paces around the curve of the corridor. It was a sharp and cold sound, hard and clear like glass. It peaked, and then thrummed in an oscillating frequency.

"Interface connected," the first voice said.

Silence.

Then a scream, sudden and shrill, agonizing to hear. Chakotay leapt forward, Tom after him, and they swung around the corner of the door.

It was a large room made all of white—white ceiling, white walls, white floor. There were beds hidden behind white screens all along the right wall. Straight ahead was a door leading into a glass-walled office. To the left was a line of operating tables, cabinets and drawers filled with surgical tools built into the wall.

Tom took this all in with a sweeping glance. Then his eyes settled on the nearest bed, the occupant lying in it, and the two Kaminoans to either side of it.

It was his captain. She lay on the bed, pale and unconscious, entire body rigid, back arched. The Kaminoan to the left of her bed held an oblong device in his hands. Two wires connected the device to the captain's temples and the two white nodules there. The Kaminoan to the right held one of the captain's hands in his, and pressed the other against her cheek and chin, long, bony fingers splayed out across half of her face. He was on his knees beside the bed.

"Move away from her," Chakotay demanded, raising the gun and pointing it at the Kaminoan touching her.

He did not move—did not even turn.

The first Kaminoan—the one holding the device—looked at them. His expression was desperate.

"We can't stop now," he said. "We're in the middle of—"

A second scream ripped through the air. The Kaminoan holding the captain jerked as if punched, his body shuddering from the invisible blow—but his hands did not move. They remained firmly pressed against her hand and face, as if bound there.

A third scream, shrill and agonized—and this time it was the captain who jerked. Her back arched higher, entire body tense and coiled tightly like a spring. Her free hand spasmed by her side, clutching at the sheet draped over the bed. Her head rolled to the side, and for a split second Tom could see the her eyes; there was only white, sick and pale and disturbing, eyes rolled back into her head.

"Let go of her!" Chakotay shouted.

"No," the other Kaminoan cried. "We must complete the procedure. If it is interrupted—"

A fourth scream—and a fifth, as the captain opened her mouth and screamed too, high and terrified.

"Let go," Chakotay bellowed, and took a threatening step forward.

The Kaminoan holding her didn't respond.

 _He can't hear Chakotay,_ Tom thought. _Something is wrong—really wrong._ _He can't let go._

The captain sat up suddenly. Her eyes were still white, her expression blank.

"Get out." The captain's voice was loud and ringing—but to Tom it sounded empty, vacant, as if something else was speaking through her. "You do not belong here."

The Kaminoan holding her jerked again. His mouth opened, but no sound came forth. His hands remained firmly pressed against her.

Tom dodged forward, hands outstretched. He grabbed onto the Kaminoan, fingers latching around its shoulder and arm, and yanked.

There was resistance, as if the Kaminoan was sunk in thick mud. Tom pulled, leaning back against the weight. But still the Kaminoan didn't move.

White. White and red and black.

Pain—coiling, striking pain lancing through his fingers, his arms, his shoulders, his chest. He yelled, and the pain filled his mouth, filled his scream. Never before had he felt pain like this; it was like a hundred thousand ants burying beneath his skin, crawling along his bones, burrowing through muscle and sinew and ligament. His whole world was pain—he was nothing but pain.

He fell.

And then there was darkness. He stood on nothing, and nothing pressed in on him from every side. He turned and found that the pain was only an echo of memory in his body. He turned again, looking for something, anything, that could ground him. But there was only nothing.

Then the nothing opened up, and Tom fell forward. Wind battered his face, caught on his uniform jacket, tugged on his hair. He squinted his eyes, looking to either side. He caught glimpses—flashes of images, thoughts, feelings—on either side of him: fire; B'Elanna's face, pale and still; a shuttle lying half-buried in the ice; and in it all: fear.

An image appeared, far before him but growing closer with every second.

The first thing he noticed were the Cardassians. They ringed the room and filled it, grey skin and grey laughter, too loud and too harsh. The nearer Tom fell, the more terrified he grew. Was there someplace he could hide? Some way he could keep from being seen?

The second thing he saw was his captain. She was maybe twenty years younger, and she was naked, bloody, and on her knees. Tom quickly averted his eyes.

That was when he saw the third thing. It was a man. He hung from the ceiling by his wrists, which were bound in shackles. He too was naked and covered in blood, and he was screaming.

The man was Tom's father.

"No," Tom cried, reaching for his father, still far away—and then everything went blank.

Fingernails raked through his brain, gouging long, bloody furrows in their wake. Tom screamed.

The furrows filled with a thousand voices.

 _She is mine_ , the voices said _. And you can't have her._ They were cold, a thousand words all in one. They echoed, and reechoed, until they filled Tom's flesh and muscles and bones. He was the words—he was one with them, was nothing but them; Tom was gone, he was only the words echoing and echoing and echoing between his ribs and lungs and heart.

 _No_ , Tom thought. It pierced through the echoes of the thousand voices like lightning splitting the night. _No_ , he thought again, and it was easier this time. The thought followed in the path of the first, and behind it came another thought. _I am Tom Paris. And this is my captain. She is not yours—if she is anyone's, she is ours. She is our leader. Our captain. Our mother. You can't have her._

 _She is MINE_ , the voices shrieked.

 _NO_ , Tom screamed at them. _She's OURS._

A pop. It filled Tom's body, ringing from fingers to head to toes. And then he was free and tumbling back. The floor rushed up and met his back, and for the third time that day all the air was pushed from his lungs with a sharp _thud_. Something hard and heavy landed on him.

"Get off him," someone— _Harry_ , Tom thought. _His name is Harry_ —said. There was a moment of movement, and then the weight pinning him to the ground and keeping his lungs from expanding was lifted away and he was free.

Tom sat up slowly, his entire body throbbing. His hands stung as if they'd been slapped.

"You okay?" Harry asked, kneeling down beside Tom.

Tom shook his head to clear his thoughts, then looked up at Harry. Harry was watching him with fear in his dark eyes.

"I'm fine," Tom reassured him. "I promise. Just a little…a little rattled." The memory of the image he saw—the image of his captain and his father—crept into his thoughts. He pushed it away; now was not the time to dwell on what he had seen.

"What happened?" Chakotay demanded. Tom looked up at him from his position on the floor and saw him pointing the gun he held at the Kaminoan still standing on the other side of the bed.

"I'm not sure," said Tom, heding. "It was like there were these…these voices yelling at me that the captain was theirs. I told them no, that she was ours. And then I was free." Tom was not yet ready to share about the image he had seen—not even with Harry, his best friend and closest confidant.

Chakotay turned to the Kaminoan, still lying on the floor beside Tom. "What happened?" he demaneded.

"I don't know," the Kaminoan said hurriedly. "I mean, I heard the voices, and I saw this image. It was a prison cell, and there were these creatures in it." He gulped, and went suddenly silent.

Chakotay narrowed his eyes. "What about you?" he asked, turning to the Kaminoan holding the device on the other side of the captain's bed.

"I'm not sure," it said. "Nothing like this has ever happened before. When a guide has been rejected in the past, they simply are unable to connect to the subject's neural patterns. That doesn't seem to have been the case here, though."

"You must have some idea what happened," Chakotay said.

"If—if I had to guess," the Kaminoan said, "and this is just a guess—but judging by what I just saw, I'd say the nanites have taken over your captain's body. They're programmed to infiltrate the subject's mind and manipulate the subject's reality. But it's possible— _possible_ , though it's never happened before—that the nanites superseded or subverted their programming and infiltrated more than just her mind. When Mor'tack here tried to connect, he did so, but the nanites then rejected him."

"How could that have happened?" Chakotay asked.

"Well," the Kaminoan said slowly, "we've never had a subject who was a carrier of the nanites for this long. Usually it's only two or three days. Your captain has carried them for two weeks."

"How do we stop it?" Chakotay asked.

"I don't know," the Kaminoan said. "Really," he added hurriedly when Chakotay frowned.

"Guess," Chakotay growled.

"If I had to guess—and this _is_ a guess—she has to complete the trials that the nanites are programmed to put her through, though I do not know what that will look like now that they have taken over her body. They are programmed to shut down and flush out of the body as soon as these trials are completed. That shutdown should still be in place."

"So how does one complete the trials?" Chakotay asked.

"First a guide must be introduced," the Kaminoan said. "But she just rejected a guide—and rather violently, as you saw."

Chakotay lowered his gun. "Okay," he said. "Hook me up."

"What?" the Kaminoan cried, surprised. "But you just saw what happened…"

"I want to at least try," Chakotay said.

"But why?"

"Because she's my captain," Chakotay replied. "And she's my best friend. I can't _not_ try."

The Kaminoan was silent for a long moment. Then he nodded. "Okay," he said.

Chakotay turned and handed the gun to Tuvok. "Good," he said. He moved to stand by the captain's bedside, where Mor'tack had stood. "I'm Chakotay," he added.

"I am Mat'iar," the Kaminoan said.

"Okay, Mat'iar," Chakotay said. "Hook me up."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please consider leaving a review; I'd love to hear your thoughts!


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